Cooling Towers

Higher than the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral (300ft), yet with a concrete hyperbolic structure in some places only seven inches thick, cooling towers are unlike any other structure in the British landscape. Artist Sir Anthony Gormley has described cooling towers as a ‘Man made volcano…a wonderful relic of the carbon age, a memorial to Britain’s great, 200-year-long romance with the second law of thermodynamics’. These modernist megaliths are akin to the Stonehenge or Avebury of the mid twentieth century, yet they exist on borrowed time.

The last coal-fired power station in the country, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, shut down on the 30th of September 2024, signalling the end of the carbon age.

From a peak of 240 towers in the 1960s, today just 45 individual cooling towers survive in clusters at 5 power station sites in the Midlands and Yorkshire, all but one of whuch are in the process of decommissioning and demolition. The Society believes there to be a further 24 examples at other industrial sites around the country, like steel plants, oil refineries and chemical works. Though these are generally much smaller in scale and of lower historic significance than those constructed at post-war power stations. A full list of all known examples can be found below. Are there any cooling towers we’ve missed? Please email coordinator@c20society.org.uk to notify us of any omissions.

The Twentieth Century Society is now calling for at least one set of cooling towers to be preserved and is exploring how they might be repurposed in the age of sustainability.

Examples of reuse

At Wunderland Kalkar, a disused cooling tower forms the centrepiece of a family theme park, with a climbing wall affixed to its concave outer surface – painted with a mountain range for added effect – and a telescopic amusement ride that emerges theatrically from within the tower. In Venice, industrial heritage vies with the architectural masterpieces of the Renaissance, as a 1938 cooling tower in Porta di Venezia was recently converted into a museum and viewing gallery, offering panoramic views over the lagoon to the fabled ‘floating city’.

At Vilvoorde on the outskirts of Brussels, an abandoned power station and military base were beset with illegal raves for many years. The entrepreneurial local Mayor, initially called to close down a rave, saw the potential for a cultural festival on the site. The annual Horst Festival now stages sonic and artistic installations within the cavernous interior spaces of the cooling towers. This was a model replicated in Hungary, at the 1950s Inota Power Plant near Budapest. The semi-derelict site had already been used as a dystopian filming location for the futuristic Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and in 2023 the INOTA music festival was launched, with video mapped projections on the three cooling towers providing a suitably sci-fi backdrop to the experimental electronica.

In South Africa’s Soweto Township, a pair of cooling towers have been wrapped with a giant painted community mural, and now provide a home for businesses that cater to the extreme sports enthusiast. A narrow bridge slung between the two towers provides a unique 100m bungee jump, while within one of the towers is a freefall jump into safety netting – reputedly the world’s highest.

C20 Campaign

To date, Historic England’s advice has been that cooling towers ‘do not have the architectural interest requisite for listing’, and that ‘at the moment there are no plans to preserve a cooling tower’, only to ‘work closely with power companies to ensure a photographic record is secured before loss’. This is

From a peak of 240 towers in the 1960s, today just 45 individual cooling towers survive in clusters at 5 power station sites in the Midlands and Yorkshire – all but one of whuch are in the process of decommissioning and demolition. We believe there to be a further 24 examples at other industrial sites around the country, like steel plants, oil refineries and chemical works. Though these are generally much smaller in scale and of lower historic significance than those constructed at post-war power stations. A full list of all known examples can be found below. Are there any cooling towers we’ve missed? Please email coordinator@c20society.org.uk to notify us of any omissions.

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The towers at West Burton included in C20 Society’s 2023-24 Risk List of the top-10 most threatened 20th and 21st century buildings in Britain. In June 2023 we staged the British Cooling Towers: Sculptural Giants exhibition at Margaret Howell on Wigmore Street London, for the London Festival of Architecture, while in spring 2025 a new book will be published by Batsford – the first to explore the architecture, engineering, landscape, and cultural impact of cooling towers. Read some of the coverage of the campaign in The Guardian, Wallpaper*, Dezeen, Apollo Magazine, PORT, Architects Journal.

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