28 CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 been an uncoordinated approach to securing a coherent archival collection. The heritage of a station’s fabric represented by its buildings, often surrounded by a designed landscape, might generally be regarded as the responsibility of the local authority historic environment team, sometimes with advice from the national heritage agencies. Uniquely, within the heritage sector planning teams may be able to influence the creation of an archive through statutory controls. These may include the commissioning of historic building reports prior to demolition. In structure such reports may conform to formats used for earlier periods. New drawings are rarely required, although some may need reworking to aid clarity. Additional photography is often required to complement historic images or to fill gaps. Electronic 3D imaging also offers many possibilities to explain the operations within the stations, but it requires a clear understanding of why it is being carried out and clarity that suitable repositories exist to hold the data in accessible forms. Many stations have voluminous archives, comprising many thousands of engineering drawings, operating manuals, personnel records, and sometimes film and photography. Although we cannot second guess what future researchers may find of interest, a highly selective retention policy will be required to reduce this mass to a size a repository might be prepared to accept. Selection has a cost and is often best performed by a knowledgeable member of station staff working to agreed guidelines. After closure the fate of some archives becomes difficult to track, as they pass from operating companies to estate managers, and perhaps to demolition contractors to inform their work. In the absence of a national power generation museum, a local county record office is often the best repository, while in other cases museums or national building archives may take material. If a complete power station cannot be saved, could components or other artefacts be retained to represent the whole? Many of the objects that might be considered fall into the category of what our colleagues in the museum sector refer to as ‘big stuff’, with all the cost implications for transport, storage and display the term implies. In many instances industries are willing to donate objects, large and small, but local and even national museums lack the resources to curate the material. There are exceptions: the 1930s Battersea control room has been incorporated into a new events space and the Science Museum Group has acquired its 1960s equivalent room from Cottam, Nottinghamshire, for possible future display. Through job losses the closure of any large industrial concern can have a catastrophic impact on its local community. In addition to what may be regarded as standard heritage responses to loss, arts projects may also offer opportunities to work with local people as their social and physical environment changes. For the fleets of redundant nuclear stations, the decommissioned hulks of their reclad and reduced reactor buildings are likely to remain for many decades while their residual reactivity decays to permit more economic dismantling. At these and many of the post-war stations, although the principal station buildings may be lost, their surrounding designed landscapes of artificial screening landforms, hedges and plantations, analogous to the gardens of an abandoned country estate, will remain. The recent loss of most of the large post-war electricity generation stations has provided an opportunity to promote the development of more comprehensive heritage strategies informed by advice in a Historic England guidance note.1 This has included collaborations with site owners, local planning authorities, the Science Museum Group, and local and national archives. Examples of some historic building reports have been lodged with the Archaeological Data Service. The recently published heritage strategy by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority provides a good example of an industry-wide initiative to acknowledge its heritage through tangible and intangible assets, objects and memories,2 while also acknowledging the benefits that heritage projects can bring to local communities and stakeholders. It is a vision that could be adopted by other industries or tailored to address the closure of a single enterprise leading to more holistic legacies for our recent industrial past. All photos by the author Wayne Cocroft has recently retired as a senior archaeological investigator with Historic England. The reclad reactor building at Bradwell, Essex, may remain for many decades. 1 Historic England (2016) England’s Redundant Post-War Coal- and Oil-Fired Power Stations, Guidelines for Recording and Archiving Their Records 2 Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (2024) NDA Group Heritage Vision and Strategy
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