Built in the mid 1950’s, the old coal-fired power station at Willington near Derby ran for just under half a century and consistently contributed to the national grid in the north running at full capacity for the majority of its operation. Now the five cooling towers are the only remaining parts that have been left untouched, abandoned but in no way hidden along the barren landscape.. Nicknamed ‘The Five Giants’ for good reason, the towers are 300 feet high, 218 feet in diameter at the base, 145 feet in diameter at the top and 122 feet in diameter at the throat and built using hundreds of tonnes of concrete. In its prime Willington Power Station actually comprised of two almost entirely independent generating stations situated on the same site. With separate management and staff, the few facilities they shared amounted to the coal and water supply. The two stations were formally known as Willington ‘A’ and Willington ‘B’, with the ‘A’ Station closest to the main road. Station A came on line in 1957 and the B station a few years later. Two of the cooling towers belonged to the A station and 3 to the B station. Having operated throughout the 60s,70s and 80s the method of generating power always remained the same; hot water produced by the generators would be pumped underneath the tower, bringing it into the contact with the air thereby creating an action of cooling through evaporation. The cool water would then be pumped back into the power station to absorb more heat and repeat the process over to constantly cool down the heavy equipment in the adjacent buildings. After those buildings were demolished, the towers were left standing but with no heating process the rain water now permanently floods the reservoirs beneath them. This was to a certain extent an ultimately inevitable demise for Willington station. Post-war Britain saw a sea of change in the way electricity was produced. The National Grid, which had been devised in the 1920s, allowed the removal of the small generating stations located in urban areas to be replaced with large, purpose built “Power Stations” linked together to deliver electricity wherever it was required. Willington was one of the first and one of the largest of its kind. However, with the energy industry changing so rapidly towards the turn of the century, the station was privatised and sold to National Power in the early 1990s who never had any intention of keeping the plant running due to its age, and the entire site eventually closed just two years later in the mid-1990s. Around the UK most of these out-dated stations were demolished at the turn of the millennium, yet the five cooling towers continue to dominate the skyline of the local area. The site is earmarked for a large residential development, pending the results of a public inquiry.
