Why I will miss our mighty cooling towers – and I suspect I am not alone

One afternoon earlier this summer we drove through Rugeley in Staffordshire. There, looming above the A51, were the cooling towers of the power station: a pinkish red, resembling terracotta, with curving convex sides, like modernist vases on a pharaonic scale. At 385 feet high, they were a little taller than the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.

We remarked on how surprisingly good they looked as we passed them on 4 June, en route to a spot in the Staffordshire countryside where we were going to stay. On 6 June there was a distant rumble like thunder but we thought little of it. However, that evening when we glanced at the horizon there was a gap where the towers had been.

The mighty cooling towers of mid-20th century power stations were monumental features of the British landscape for half a century. Huge thought went into their siting by landscape architects such as Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe (author of The Landscape of Power). Now they are disappearing fast. Didcot A and B are both gone. Four of the eight at Eggborough were blown up the other day. Of course, when they were being built, they were widely loathed as gigantic eyesores. Many people are probably glad to see them go. Nonetheless, others will miss them, and as a general rule it’s only when things are gone or about to go that we discover that we value them.

Those towers raise in an acute form the dilemmas of preservation, which are, in a nutshell: what to keep, how we should do it and why we should bother. David Hockney has observed that in general works of art and architecture survive for one of two reasons: either because they are made of some material so robust it is hard to destroy or because somebody loves them.