Pinkston Power Station (1955)
When this picture was taken in the mid-1950s, the cooling tower was very new, having been constructed from 1952-54. At that time, it was Europe’s largest cooling tower. The picture gives a sense of development taking place against a background of existing buildings and places: new concrete cooling towers added to a Victorian power station; while cars and horses share cobbled roads. It seems barely credible that this image dates only from the 1950s and shows that old energy was in many ways Victorian and antiquated even in the middle of the twentieth century.