Photo copyright James Attlee
We are here to experience the work of the artists Barbaresi
& Round – the result of their three-month residency at the power station --
but also to salute the passing of an icon in the life of south Oxfordshire,
that has shaped so many lives in different ways. Didcot A Power Station
attracted workers from as far afield as Glasgow, Newcastle and Liverpool,
transforming the community of the town as well as transforming the landscape of
Oxfordshire. How did I get involved? I’m a writer and I’ve lived 10 miles away
in East Oxford for the past 17 years. For much of that time I’ve been
travelling through Didcot by train to London to work and I became obsessed with
the power station, the way it looked, its impact on the landscape. I ended up
taking some 800 photographs of it from the train, at speed, in different
seasons of the year, over a period of years. So I was very pleased when Rachel
Barberesi arranged that I could join the last public tour of the site, which
included us two, a cameraman and sound recordist, Martyn Bull and Wendy, our
guide, the week before the station stopped generating in March this year.
Before we address the work we can see around us, I want to set the scene with a
few words. If there are any local historians in the audience I apologise for
summing up several millennia of the town’s history in a few sentences, but
we’re pushed for time.
The places that have played a vital role in the life of a
nation don’t always draw attention to themselves. Upstream from here is Oxford,
home to a university and a car factory. Downstream is the city port of London
from which Britain once ruled the world’s largest empire. But I would argue
that Didcot has always been at the centre of things, roughly equidistant from
the sea in three directions, located next to a great river that is bound up
with Britain’s history. It’s always been connected. You probably know that when
excavations were begun for Didcot A Power Station they discovered the skull of
a bison, thought to be around 100,000 years old, leading scientists to surmise
that Didcot must once have been joined to the North American continent.
Fast-forwarding through the centuries, the Thames Valley and its surrounding
escarpments are littered with Bronze Age remains. Celts, Romans, Saxons all
traded, settled and fought each other here. A Neolithic tribe carved the white
horse on the hillside at Uffington for reasons we will never fathom, an image
that can only be read from a distance, one of the prehistoric wonders of the
world. Alfred the Great was born in nearby Wantage. The river through the
centuries has provided fish, powered water wheels and been a thoroughfare for
trade, connecting London to Reading and Oxford and beyond through the canal
network created in the 18th century to Bristol and Coventry.
It has always been technology that has put Didcot on the map
and it was when Brunel’s railway arrived in the mid-nineteenth century that
this small town first found itself at the heart of a network that was keeping
the country running. One of Charles Dickens’ lesser-known works is a short
novella called Mugglesby Junction. In it
a man who is disillusioned with life packs his bags and travels to a railway
junction town, from where he can take a train in any direction. He has no clear
idea where he is going and keeps visiting the station, contemplating all the
possible destinations he might travel to. In the end he becomes drawn into the
life of the town and settles there. From Didcot Parkway, too, one can set out
to the great cities of the midlands and the north, to Scotland, to London, to
Southampton or in a westerly direction to Bristol, Wales and Cornwall. The
town’s strategic importance was recognised in 1914 when the army decided to
site their massive ordnance stores here so that weaponry could be dispatched by
train anywhere in Britain and onwards overseas as rapidly as possible. The
store was the biggest in Europe and had 30 miles of internal railways. When the
army withdrew from the site in the early 1960s it became the obvious place from
which to control the flow of a different kind of power. Coal could be brought
to it by rail from the east midlands coalfields. It was near multiple centres
of population in the electricity-hungry south, and it was next to a river that
could provide water for cooling the plant.
For those of us who didn’t work at the station, who never entered
the turbine hall or stood immediately adjacent to one of the cooling towers,
it’s hard to get a sense of the scale of the 375-acre site.
This diagram helps us put it in perspective slightly. As you
can see, St Pauls Cathedral would fit comfortably inside one of the cooling
towers and the 650ft chimney dwarfs the GPO Tower.
Looking at a diagram is one thing. Barbaresi and Round’s
artworks ask us to engage with scale in a different way. I want to say at the
outset that what we can see around us in the gallery is only a very small part
of the work they have undertaken as part of their residency at the station in
the run-up to its closure. This has included interviewing and interacting with
employees and ex-employees of the station, with a school group and with
residents of Didcot as well as with other artists including writers and
photographers. So rather than setting themselves the task of making a work in
response to a particular thing they have inserted themselves into the local
community almost as a way of allowing certain conversations to take place. As
public artists, then, they act as much as facilitators and curators of other
people’s efforts as creators of their own work. In fact, of course, all of it –
the workshops, the conversations, the rummaging in cupboards and looking
through archives, the invitations to other artists and writers to get involved
-- is ‘the work’. You can see the results of these activities
partly on their blog, where clouds are made,
and partly in the book created for the exhibition which in physical form is
over there on the shelf and can also be downloaded as a PDF from their site. I
really would encourage you to look at the book and I’ll mention some of the
things it includes in a moment.
How as an artist can you represent the sheer scale of
something as massive as Didcot A in a small gallery space like this? If we look
over here at the floor we will see they have laid out to-scale maps which allow
us to compare the size of the arts centre in the town square where we are to
the footprint of Didcot A. The
building we are in and our immediate surroundings, constructed on a human
scale, are made to look toy-like, insignificant, compared to the vast edifices
of modernist technology
The architect in charge of the building programme at Didcot
was Frederick Gibberd -- later Sir Frederick Gibberd – who went on to be one of
the most significant British modernist architects of the 20th
century. He went on to design the arrivals hall at Heathrow, which was recently
replaced by Terminal 5, from the roof of which in the 1960s crowds gathered to
welcome the Beatles back from their American tour, as well as the young Queen
when she returned from overseas visits. Gibberd also designed Liverpool
Metropolitan Cathedral – better known to Scousers as Paddy’s Wigwam – and the
Central London Mosque at Regent’s Park. Of course, as an architect he had
nothing to do with designing the shape of a cooling tower, which is dictated by
its function, but he made the decision on how the towers were positioned – he
decided they should be gathered in two groups of three rather than positioning
all six together, to lessen their visual impact -- and how the overall site was
landscaped. You can’t help wondering whether the shapes he had to play with at
Didcot influenced some of his later projects: the sinuous curves of the cooling
towers are somehow echoed in the upward parabola of the cathedral roof in
Liverpool and the dome of the mosque at Regent’s Park.
Barbaresi & Round discovered some wonderful archival
material while they were researching at the station, demonstrating the
thoroughness with which Gibberd explored the impact the site would have on the
surrounding landscape, including the drawings he made of the power station onto
photographs of the site taken from various viewpoints. One of the projects you
can see in the book is by Martyn Bull who has also contributed the sound piece
you can hear intermittently during the exhibition, a recording of what was the
ever-present hum of generators at the station. He tracked down the sites from
which these photographs were taken and photographed them again, over 45 years
later, revealing fewer changes than we might have imagined. In the book you
will also find examples of the work of photographer Paul Bodsworth, who has a
much-visited site on Facebook called The Social Landscape of Didcot which
examines the station’s visual relationship with the town and the surrounding
countryside in a less documentary way. The book also includes work by The
Photographic Section of Didcot A’s sports and social club. These are
extraordinary images, taken by insiders with access throughout the site so they
can get up close to the colossal machinery and network of pipes within the
station.
Let’s return to the work we can see in the gallery and the
scaffolding that divides the rooms in two. This wall divides the images that
relate to the outside of the power station to those relating to the inside, but
it also represents something itself, firstly in its use of scale, and secondly
in the means of its construction. The scaffolding wall is a 1:1 scale model of the shape of a
section of one of the cooling towers. If you walk through the ‘door’ in the scaffolding
and stand on the side furthest from the entrance to the gallery space, you will
be able to see that where the scaffolding meets the ground it describes a
slight arc. This is the actual curvature of a small section of one of the
cooling towers. Being able to see how infinitesimally the arc in the gallery
curves allows us to get a real sense of the scale of the towers themselves,
which are 91 metres in diameter. If it is standing in for a cooling tower, why
is the wall constructed out of wood? The artists became fascinated during their
research by the way engineers on the site constantly had to improvise as they
came across entirely new problems. There was a technical development
section whose job it was to re-engineer the plant as construction proceeded and
they moved towards generation. Looking at archived news interviews they were also amazed how fast the
buildings themselves were raised, using new building methods and
round-the-clock work gangs to claw back time. The chimney was erected in
three to four weeks from start to finish, with concrete constantly poured into
a mould that was slowly raised by hydraulic jacks as men inserted steel
reinforcements. The
interviews included in the book reveal something of this frontier spirit: we
learn, for instance, how in the run up to the plant going into
full-scale electricity production four boilers were found to have hairline
cracks that if allowed to develop could have caused them to burst, spraying the
surrounding area with thousands of gallons of super-hot water and steam. The
final designs weren’t arrive at until the 1980s; within a few years the station
had to adapt again to new legislation and partially convert to burning
bio-mass. As one ex-employee, Brian, put it in an interview, remembering the
early years, ‘we were working on the edge of technology’. The modular scaffolding construction
is the artists’ response to this legacy of creative engineering, their own
demonstration of inventiveness in the face of the smaller but still significant
challenge to bring in the exhibit on time.
There is something heroic about what was achieved at Didcot
A; the constant reinvention-as-process is reminiscent of accounts of the
engineering of the early railways. (On the London to Bristol line that runs
through Didcot, Brunel built the widest-span brick-arch bridge in the world at
Maidenhead and the world’s longest tunnel at Box, both challenges that were
widely claimed to be impossible). Whatever our feelings
today about fossil-fuel generation it is important not to view the past through
the lens of the present. Global warming wasn’t the brooding, ever-present
threat in the 1960s that it is now. A station like Didcot represents perhaps
the last moment when it seemed possible we might reach the utopian,
technologically driven world that modernism promised.
The laser-cut vinyl drawings on the wall encapsulate some of
this feeling of optimism in their bright colours and the pop art-like
simplicity of their graphical style. They are largely inspired by the artists’
visit to the central control room at the power station, which I can testify,
having visited it myself, had something of the feeling of the high-tech lair of
a James Bond super-villain, with its banks of dials and levers and walls of
screens. There are some great photographs in the book of these environments. It
is instructive to be reminded how swiftly our ideas of the future, on which we
base our dreams and our policy decisions, hurtle into the past, seemingly
becoming comically dated overnight.
Didcot first found its way into my own work when in my book Isolarion:
A Different Oxford Journey I described the
experience of coming through the gap in the Chilterns on the M40 motorway from
London and seeing the landscape of south Oxfordshire ahead. I was being driven
by the artist Richard Wentworth, who was then the Director of the Ruskin School
of Drawing and Fine Art; we had been planning to have a conversation but he was
very busy and this seemed the only way we could find the time to be together
for an hour or so.
‘We emerge through the cutting
in the Chilterns and begin our descent; the sun breaks through the clouds,
illuminating the sweep of the plain below. Fields glowing the luminous green of
an English spring are punctuated with small hills, studded with darker trees.
In the distance, the cooling towers at Didcot each appear to balance a
solid-looking cloud on its end, a power generator’s circus trick. Apart from
this modernist detail, we could be looking at the landscape in the background
of a Renaissance painting.
“My God” Richard comments, “it looks like Tuscany with a
power station”.
And then in summer, I reply rather glibly, Tuscany
becomes Oxfordshire without a power station. But it’s true: in July and August,
the middle classes migrate south like swallows to France and Italy, returning
just before the swallows themselves begin the same journey, without the aid of
four-wheel drive’.
However, it hasn’t been from a car that I have most closely
engaged with the geometrical composition formed by the cooling towers and the
turbine hall at Didcot and the extraordinary cloud sculptures the station
produced. For 12 years I commuted every day from Oxford to London by train – a
time during which I undertook much of the writing and research for three books
– and during that time I became obsessed with the power station, gradually
becoming convinced that it was the most visually remarkable thing I saw each
day. The photographs I took of it
from the train window, attempted to capture the
shifting colours and atmospheric effects that were different every time I made
the trip. Travelling at speed, I had to guess when to press the shutter. I came
to appreciate the blurring caused by the velocity and vibration of the train,
its effects appearing almost like brush-strokes in the final photograph. Often
I caught nothing. Once or twice I was passing at the precise moment when the
sun hit the glass-clad wall of the turbine hall, illuminating it in a blaze of
gold. Railway and power station -- I was combining two forms of pioneering
technology in one image, created with another; the digital shift in our
culture, combined with the arrival of the internet, has had an impact
unprecedented since the arrival of the railway network fundamentally shifted
our understanding of space and time. The station has ceased humming; its towers
emit no clouds. It is not entirely clear how we will continue to power our
lives. The passing of Didcot A marks the end of an age of confidence that
science and technology would deliver all the answers and the beginning of our
journey into a more uncertain future.
James Attlee
June 2013
You can follow James' blog at http://writeronthetrain.com/
James Attlee
June 2013
You can follow James' blog at http://writeronthetrain.com/
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