Summer 1947 / Autumn 1948: Like nowhere on earth

The closure of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in September marked the end of 142 years of coal power in the UK. It also offered a moment to reflect on the passing of one of the icons of the industrial age: the hyperbolic cooling tower. The writer James Graham, creator of the Nottinghamshire-based TV series Sherwood, is among those calling for at least some of the 114m-high Ratcliffe towers to be saved. “Some might think they’re ugly,” he wrote on X. “I think they’re majestic. Concrete cathedrals. I got to stand inside one, filming Sherwood series two. I’ve never stood anywhere like it on Earth.”

Early issues of Concrete Quarterly were similarly awestruck. Reporting on the opening of Hams Hall B power station in Birmingham in 1948, our writer feared the reader may find the project’s vital statistics “too mighty for meaning”. The four cooling towers – then the largest in the world – each had a capacity of four million gallons and stood 310ft high and 209ft in diameter at the base.

“The hourly requirement of water is sixteen million gallons, which has been calculated as being nearly half the whole of the daily domestic consumption of Birmingham.” A year earlier, in the magazine’s very first issue, an extension to Blackburn power station in Whitebirk had taken centre stage. Increasing its by 70,000kW, the project included two extensions to the turbine house, a new chimney and two new cooling towers – earning it the moniker “the Battersea of the North”.

The cooling towers rose to 250ft and each had an hourly capacity of 1,800,000 gallons. A new structural feature was a 10,000-gallon trough near the top of each tower, which caught water as it condensed and stored it for the firefighting system. The Blackburn Whitebirk power station closed in October 1976, and the cooling towers were demolished in May 1982. Hams Hall closed in 1981 and was demolished in 1985. According to the 20th Century Society, from a peak of 240 towers in the 1960s, just 45 survive. None are listed, and all but one are in the process of decommissioning and demolition.

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