Obituary: The Cooling Towers January 27, 2009

 

I am sad about the demolition of the Tinsley cooling towers. Their destruction is a loss to Sheffield. But it is not the death of all culture, nor part of some battle of civic innocence against the forces of corporate rampage. Blaming the city of Sheffield, blaming the power company, blaming the government or anyone else is not at all useful at this point. If we want to end up with anything more than a sense of bitter helplessness, we have to understand that there is a current culture of inability to understand and articulate the value of our landmarks, icons, opportunities and more. If there are not to be more lost cooling towers, giant icons or just loved places in the future, the culture has to change. The issues which surround the demolition of the cooling towers are relevant to the whole idea of regeneration in Sheffield and beyond.

The cooling towers’ fate was fought over in a drawn out process in which, ultimately, there were no clear sides or aims. The initial decision to demolish them was firstly a commercial one. The power company Eon, owners of the site, sought to redevelop the site as a new power station, requiring demolition of the two towers. Whatever might be inferred about corporate philistinism or cultural insensitivity, this business decision came to be so contested not because it was part of some revolutionary class struggle, but because it seemed such a damn stupid idea. The recurring question was ‘WHY!?’ It is tempting to portray Eon as scheming electricity barons in the mould of Mr. Burns, though ironically his cooling towers are the symbol of his power over the city, but however much they seemed ignorant of the towers’ potential, we cannot pretend that preservation is an easy, passive thing. We do not have a worthwhile culture of regeneration in which the towers could have been saved.

The cooling towers may have been huge physical landmarks and powerful symbols, but they always remained somewhat ambiguous. Even now, after all that was done to try and save them, what is that Sheffield has lost exactly? The discussion about the towers as potential structures and symbols was always trapped in confused discourses which obscured any purpose or developed ideas; the way that conservation, culture and development take place as processes needs to be re-thought. The last few years of political involvement, design proposals and souvenirs will come to mean nothing otherwise.

When redundant buildings are not considered valuable as pieces of ‘heritage,’ what independent life do they have left? The problem with the idea of protecting artifacts of history and heritage is that they are required to have an inherent value which is worth sustaining. The legal, and perhaps quite conservative, British idea of heritage as something which illustrates and puts a version of history in context favours the picturesque over the purely spectacular. Attempts to have the cooling towers listed and protected as buildings of special historical significance were unsuccessful because, as reported by English Heritage, there was not enough of the original working structures remaining. In their report of March 2008 they reported that the cooling towers were “not only a very partial survival of an electricity generating station, they are also only a very partial survival of a pair of cooling towers.” It seems that where images of grand industry are part of ‘heritage,’ industrial decay is resigned to being history.

It is arguable that this attitude naturally excludes the (post-) Industrial North, for industry is ugly and it’s everywhere; what help does it possibly need? In fact, almost the exact opposite is true. All major landscape, urban and rural, in modern times has been shaped by industrial activity, but it is generally an underlying feature as opposed to a visually comprehensible symbol of history. The Don Valley has been hugely re-engineered, factory waste has caused weird plant species to grow, street patterns are made by the arrangement of workshops. For things to actually happen, our discussion of regeneration has to go beyond arguments over who’s got the biggest icon. Though large projects might represent an ideal, the details of conservation and re-use need to be understood at a more empirical level and away from abstract political shouting matches.

A series of projects intended to either work with or replace the cooling towers have been proposed in recent years. Ranging from sublime to vulgar - the idea for a giant stainless steel football (memorably described as like replacing the Angel of the North with a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale made out of coal) being a particular low - they all acknowledged and communicated a certain set of perceptions of the towers. Through these plans, all agreed that the towers were something highly visible, evocative of something northern and industrial and definitive of the edge, the gateway to Sheffield. Rather than asking where these plans went, we should ask where these ideas are now.

Grand master-plans like these are rarely followed through, and their more useful function is to negotiate ideas and perceptions which can be developed into working plans. This planning process, however, is ill-defined. If we do genuinely want to see better new places in Sheffield, we need better ways of discussing and communicating ideas which apply to real places. To get to a full design, you need a sketch. The continual problem in Sheffield is lack of imagination and perception of what could be…

The re-use of buildings is powerful in this respect. Compared to new constructions, the potential is huge for a discussion of social, programmatic effects. Where the built effects of a new shopping centre might be contested - it’s too big, ugly etc - the details of its cultural implications are rarely considered - note Meadowhall. Because they are already in existence, programs for re-use signal a reawakening of the building in question amongst pretty much anyone who has an opinion. An example would be if I announced that I planned to build a new shiny art gallery in Sheffield (doubtless it would be ‘iconic’) the response might be relatively indifferent and focussed on economic cost, architectural issues. See also Leopold Square. If instead I declared that I wanted to convert the Victoria Quays area into a pretentious contemporary art space, the discourse would change. Not only could the relative merits of a new art gallery come into focus, but any feeling about the area, its history, its potential would become apparent. This goes beyond re-using old buildings to a dialogue about developments in relation to Sheffield as a place, not a generic city.

So what is it that Sheffield is losing/has lost? For a victim of amputation to accept an artificial limb, they must first feel phantom limb pain, the sensation of a full body. This does not mean that there should be some trite architectural replacement of the cooling towers, but that we should consider what state Sheffield could be in, what we want it to be and how it could be done. Now the towers are lost, there needs to be a feeling which goes beyond cynicism to something truly constructive. There are some amazing places, and even more possibilities, but it’s better to make them great now than be angry when they’re gone.