Willington power station towers

 

Boaters on the Eastern end of the Trent & Mersey Canal are familiar with the gaunt, derelict towers of Willington Power station, which are 50 years old this year and have been silent for for over 10.

When I moved to Willington this year I immediately decided I liked them. They are 'monumental'; they define an era and shout of past glories when coal was cool.  (Incidentally, at what point did supporting the miners cease being cool and become a hot potato for the protest industry?)

To my surprise I find most of the locals are just as ah-bless sentimental about the old towers as me.  Why should this be, when those towers don't actually do anything?  I wonder if it's because there's a powerful need for people to have a focus to their towns or villages, to have something to look up to, as it were, and the towers have an inspiring 'cathedral' feel, something that the local St Michael's Church - charming and ancient as it is - just doesn't have.  

Populist philosopher Alain De Botton touches on this sentiment in his essay 'A religion for atheists':

Imagine a network of secular churches, vast high spaces in which to escape from the hubbub of modern society and in which to focus on all that is beyond us.  It isn’t surprising that secular people continue to be interested in cathedrals.  Their archi­tecture performs the very clever and eternally useful function of relativising those who walk inside them.  We begin to feel small ­inside a cathedral and recognise the debt that sanity owes to such a feeling.

But the towers are clearly doomed.  The local press this week highlighted plans by RWE Npower to construct a giant new 2GW gas-fired power station on the site.  I say 'giant' - and its output will be as prodigious as the massive 8-towered Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station just down the river - but as a modern gas-fired plant its profile will be much slighter than the present towers.

Power station village keen to keep its cooling towers - Derby Evening Telegraph
What new £1bn power station could look like - Burton Mail

This press coverage was the result of a three-day consultation exercise by Npower in local village halls.

The company sent over some warm and friendly staff making soothing noises to the locals.  They promise up to 1,000 temporary jobs in construction of the building, and maybe 100 ongoing jobs.

The proposed new power station looks low-profile, and there's no 'cathedral' aspect to it.  For all its power it lacks monumentalism.  Indeed, I think it's almost TOO SMALL! 

One of Npower's reps called the design 'standard Euro boxes'.  The local Labour MP Mark Todd - who's standing down at the next election - and his anointed successor both came to the exhibition and I overheard that they both asked if it could somehow be MORE IMPRESSIVE.  I think they meant architecturally.  Yes, they were told, it could be, but it will cost, and who's going to pay for that in the current recession?  

(When I heard that I thought:  What would Mr James Brindley or Mr Thomas Telford have said?) 

But you and I are canal lovers, so I asked a bigger question of Npower's project manager Mike Peel:

"What role will the Trent & Mersey Canal play in the new power station - in either its construction or its ongoing operation?"

Mike Peel sounded nonplussed.  I don't think he'd even entertained the possibility.   After all, all water for the new low-profile cooling towers will be taken from the nearby River Trent, and they saw no other role for water.

Of course, a gas-powered station won't need a canal, not like the old coal-fired stations.  In the longer term it won't even need the railway sidings they are planning to build (temporarily) just to bring in building materials.

But if I was British Waterways I'd be looking for a way of persuading Npower to let them transport a lot of the power station's building materials, upriver on the Trent and then from Shardlow to Willington via the canal.

It wouldn't necessarily be profitable, but it would surely be good publicity for water transport in general. 

And with the life of the new power station being only about 25 years, it would be a serious reminder that the canal itself could well still have a purpose after all the gas we are sucking from Siberia has run out.

In the meantime, here's an aerial view of the site, taken from Npower's website.  It was photographed before Mercia Marina was developed; notice the empty field (centre-right)  where now Mercia Marina's new 'nature reserve' lake and island (shown in the foreground in the picture at top) now stand. 

Comments

[Halfie]

A case of metrication leading to the demise of the waterways? I guess two-yard loads would have fitted.

[Max Sinclair]

Two metre loads fouled the gunwhales, very frustrating for Willow Wren who had to hand load at the docks.

[Andrew Denny]

Halfie, what you see as black diamonds I see as square boxes, and I think it's a bug with my blog service, TypePad. Any time someone comments, I get emailed a copy. If I just hit 'reply', it automatically posts my reply as another comment, which is a nice feature. However, I think it is treating certain characters (carriage returns, dashes, etc) as unknown characters. I'll look into it.

[Halfie]

Oh, and Andrew, what's with all the question marks in black diamonds � which have been littering some of your own comments recently�

[Halfie]

Max, am I missing something? 2 metres is just under 6 feet 7 inches. Narrow canal gauge is (was?) (nominally) 7 feet. Or is it that the entrance to the hold of a narrowboat is constricted to less than 6' 7" by the gunwales?

[Andrew Denny]

Max,

Don't forget that the canal is broad to Willington, and as far as Burton. 

And my point is that it would be a sort of PR thing for BW anyway.

 

Andrew

[Max Sinclair]

Sadly a Narrow Canal has little carrying possibilities because the boats are less than two metres wide. The considerable timber trade to the Midlands ceased in the 1960's when timber was bundled in two metre shipping loads and had to be broken down to fit in narrow boats.