Given the amount of times I’ve photographed cooling towers and power stations it’s remarkable that I’ve never managed to capture one in steam before now.
It used to be such a common sight across Britain, a power station in steam. But that steam came from the cooling of superheated water that had been used to drive turbines and generate electricity – a process in stations of this vintage that was generally fired by coal.
The Industrial Revolution hero turned Millennial whipping boy has suffered the most spectacular fall from grace since its combustion was linked to the production of greenhouse gases. King Coal was once mined all over the land and powered dozens of generating stations, but in twenty first century Britain the mining industry has all but gone, and the power stations – well, their closure is being accelerated at an almost reckless speed given the inherent insecurities in our energy market.
Once at the forefront of the post-war consumerism boom, the remaining coal fired power stations are only really used as a last resort now. Which makes scenes like this pretty uncommon, and well worth getting the camera out if you’re at all interested in this kind of thing.
I was headed south for the Bank Holiday weekend and watching the weather with a view to stopping by here regardless, but in all honesty I didn’t expect to get shots nearly as pleasing as these. Driving down the A50 from the M6 to the M1 I’d already stopped at the Willington service area – spitting distance from its own disused power station and sometime playground of mine – and it was here that I realised the clouds were clearing from the same direction in which I was driving. If the journey continued this way under the cloud to which I’d become accustomed, I’d only be slightly ahead of some kind of light bursting on to the scene. Duly, I arrived at Redhill Marina under cloudy skies – but they were already thinning beneath a weak sun. And the added bonus – Ratcliffe Power Station was in steam. All I had to do was wait out on what turned out to be a deep blue sky and rich summer light far beyond anything I’d expected.
There was something other-worldly about the place, timeless almost, like the area never really evolved and the sixties never really moved on. The marina adorns a dog-legged section of the River Soar adjacent to open fields, with dozens of boats moored up along the water’s edge and the odd caravan behind. Occasional houses sat on their own, with sparse other buildings almost subsumed by undergrowth in the surrounding fields. As the clouds cleared, towers of white steam rose straight up against the deep blue beyond, every imprint on the concrete cooling towers highlighted by the warm afternoon sun. Yellow grasses contrast against the deep blue backdrop on a huge field just littered with old boats. There was so much to take in, so much to see and photograph before the light was lost, and it all had the oddest yet relaxing feel to it.
A wasteland of redundant roads and hard standings is cleared of fly-tipping and blocked with concrete blocks that challenge you to figure out what any of it was even there for in the first place. It’s strange, but terrifically photogenic, and all the while you wonder how much longer the scene will last for.
Longer than expected, actually. Ratcliffe was supposed to be partly closed this year, fully closed in two years’ time, but for the current energy security crisis that has seen a reprieve and will keep it on the grid for a little while yet.
With so many of these great marvels of engineering having been removed from the landscape recently (and taking away a swathe of motorway navigational waymarkers in the process), these ones at least will remain where the A50 meets the M1 for the foreseeable. A big old chunk of modernist hope in a world with increasingly little…