Location Spotting: Cooling Towers

 

I’m always interested in locations from film and television. Many years ago, I trailed around the suburbs of Manchester trying to find locations from the 1963 film Billy Liar only to discover, much later, that they’d been shot in Bradford. But back then, I didn't have the internet to assist me...

Locations are always easier to track down when they include a landmark of some kind – by which I mean large, prominent buildings or other distinctive features in the landscape. Since childhood, I’ve nutured a curious fascination for coal-fired power stations, having been impressed at an early age by the shape and proportions of the cooling towers that were usually associated with such places. Within the past month, Britain’s last coal-fired generating station at Ratcliffe on Soar, Nottinghamshire, was closed for good, and the past twenty years have seen the decommissioning and demolition of stations the length and breadth of the British Isles. Save for a few stragglers – such as the five towers of Willington Power Station in Derbyshire – the many cooling towers that once dominated the landscape have long since gone to dust.

So if I ever spot a power station on an old piece of film or television, I’m keen to find out where it was. Last week, in Z Cars – currently being repeated on Talking Pictures TV – we got some good shots of two good examples in North London. There were a good many power stations dotted across the London suburbs over the years, so identification is not always easy. One of the two stations, however, I recognised, as it can also be seen in John Betjeman’s film Metro-land, shot a year before the Z Cars episode in 1972. This facility, located in Neasden, can easily be identified by the distinctive shape of its twin cooling towers (these structures showed a surprising amount of variation in their appearance). Neasden was already mothballed by the time the Z Cars episode was filmed, having been decomissioned in 1968. 

 

Neasden power station as seen in Z Cars, Absence (above) and Metro-Land (below)

The Z Cars episode included shots of another power station, still in operation, and located close to a canal. This one proved somewhat harder to identify. As the shots from the episode show, the station had three cooling towers and two smokestacks emerging from a large, brick built boiler house. Its canalside location helped in tracking it down, as did proximity to Neasden. I considered, but ruled out Brimsdown in Essex (too many cooling towers and of the wrong design) and West Ham power station (towers in the wrong configfuration), but after a bit of Googling, I found an image that matched almost exactly to one of the shots in the episode. The station in question was at Acton Lane, Willesden – not far from Neasden and conveniently close to the BBC studios at Shepherds’ Bush. The plant remained in operation until 1983, and its location can be seen clearly on this section from a London A-Z map of the same era.

It’s surprising to realise exactly how many power stations once served the major urban and industrial areas of the UK. Googling for images reveals numerous examples, all variations on the same basic design and layout, with plants often comprising half a dozen or more cooling towers. In more recent times, cooling towers have been demonised as iconography of fossil fuel power generation, with picture editors on news and documentary programmes using shots of the structures to illustrate the issue of global warming. In fact, nothing but steam ever emerged from cooling towers, which were used, as their name suggests, to cool the water from the steam turbines before recyling it back into the plant. The harmful carbon emissions from power stations came only from the tall smokestacks. But cooling towers, with their vast size and grimy weathering, made a better visual scapegoat.

In fact, I’ve always found them intriguing structures, and having lived in the vicinity of a few examples, would often be impressed by the effect of different lighting conditions, especially when the plants were running at full capacity and sending up vast columns of steam. I’m sure most people considered them blots on the landscape, but those who lived in close proximity to such stations have often developed a sentimental attachment to the towers and are sad to see them go.

And of course, modern thinking tells us that coal-fired power generation was a bad thing. That may be so, but where would we have been without it? One only has to think back to the days of miners’ strikes and the resulting power cuts to appreciate the monumental importance those stations played in everyday life.

There’s no point in looking out for power stations in today’s Britain, unless you happen to be travelling along the A50 trunk road, where you’ll still see the examples I mentioned earlier. So the best place to spot them is in vintage film and television...

Acton Lane (Willesden) power station as seen in Z Cars above, and in a Flickr image taken from the same spot, evidently a few years later (note the same tree is still visible)