The Twentieth Century Society has unveiled seven remarkable photographs from its latest book that showcase the sculptural and often overlooked architectural features of the United Kingdom's rapidly disappearing cooling towers. The conservation group's new publication, simply titled "Cooling Towers," explores the cultural significance of these concrete megastructures through the lens of art, design, photography, and popular culture.
The book comes as part of the Twentieth Century Society's urgent campaign to preserve the UK's remaining cooling towers, of which only 37 exist across five sites today. This represents a dramatic decline from the peak of 240 cooling towers that stood across Britain in the 1960s. The structures are being demolished at an alarming rate of six to eight per year, prompting conservationists to warn that they could become extinct by the end of this decade.
"The window of opportunity to save cooling towers is closing fast," said Catherine Croft, the charity's director. "They're being demolished at a rate of six to eight per year, so by the end of this decade, they'll be almost completely extinct. It really is now or never. In nearly 50 years of campaigning and archi-activism, saving a set of cooling towers is undoubtedly our biggest ever challenge."
Unlike the organization's typical preservation campaigns, which focus on architectural merit and historic interest, the Twentieth Century Society has taken a broader approach with cooling towers. "In compiling the book, we've deliberately taken a broader approach," explained campaigns director Oli Marshall. "Yes, exploring their remarkable design and engineering, but also looking at their presence in the landscape, celebrating their wider cultural impact. Cooling towers are also immensely photogenic, so it's full of exquisite imagery by some of the most revered photographers of the 20th century."
The charity hopes the book will reveal the "unexpectedly beautiful" features of cooling towers and encourage public support for preserving rather than demolishing these concrete structures. The organization also aims to demonstrate how decommissioned cooling towers can be repurposed for the 21st century as the UK transitions to a greener energy network.
The seven featured architectural elements highlight the towers' sculptural qualities and impressive engineering. The first feature focuses on the "tower mouth" - the circular opening at the top that frames the sky in a way reminiscent of artist James Turrell's Skyspace installations. One photograph was taken inside the pair of towers at Tinsley in Sheffield, which were demolished in 2008 despite vigorous local campaigns and media coverage.
The internal walkways represent another striking feature, with slender spans crossing the full width of towers that measure more than 114 meters tall and 30 meters wide - two and a half times the height of Nelson's Column and large enough to contain the entire dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. These interior spaces have served as cinematic backdrops for films including Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," "Among Giants" starring Pete Postlethwaite, and the BBC series "Sherlock."
The peculiar oval openings known as "coffin doors" or "hobbit doors" provide the only access point for engineers and technicians, positioned approximately one-third of the way up the tower's side. Their unique design results from the towers' concave hyperboloid structure, and despite their enormous size, the reinforced concrete shell measures only 17 centimeters thick, deriving strength from its egg-like shape.
Inside the towers, the eliminator screens and packing levels showcase the functional beauty of the cooling process. These meshed screens and networks of spray pipes increase the contact surface area between water and air, creating efficient heat transfer as steam from power station turbines is cooled for recycling back to the boilers.
The dramatic "curtains of water" create spectacular visual effects as cooled and condensed water cascades through the packing level to collecting ponds at the base. This process occurs within a lattice of supporting concrete columns cloaked in spray, with each cooling tower capable of processing upwards of two billion liters of water per hour. Only about two percent of the water escapes as water vapor from the tower's top.
Surprisingly, these monumental structures don't rely on substantial foundations but instead rest on graceful rings of slender V-shaped concrete struts. This elevated design creates an illusion of weightlessness while allowing fresh air to be drawn in at the bottom through natural updraft, cooling the water to around 20 degrees Celsius.
The concrete exteriors, while appearing smooth and monolithic from a distance, reveal surprisingly textural qualities up close, with gridded shuttering marks from their poured concrete construction clearly visible. Different locations used variable aggregates to soften the towers' appearance in the landscape, such as the distinctive pink and ferrous-tinted towers at Ironbridge B Power Station, which were demolished in 2019 despite referencing the local stone and soil colors.
"We're used to seeing cooling towers from afar; they're the distant markers in the landscape by which we calibrate our journeys to and from home," concluded Croft. "Yet up close they're exquisite sculptural objects, designed by some of the leading engineers, architects and landscape architects of the day." The Twentieth Century Society's comprehensive documentation through "Cooling Towers" represents what may be one of the final opportunities to appreciate and preserve these remarkable examples of 20th-century industrial architecture before they vanish from Britain's landscape forever.
