Following on from yesterday’s Iron Bridge visit, this first photo is for Jude. She wanted to know if the Ironbridge cooling towers still existed. The power station, just upstream from the Iron Bridge, has been recently decommissioned. There are plans for demolition, and the site to be developed for housing.
There are four cooling towers, and if you walk along the river they loom dramatically above you. Love them or hate them, Jude and I are for them. They are anyway part of our industrial heritage, though mainly I like them because they look like giant flower pots. And I like them even more now they aren’t giving off dirty-coal fumes.
Across the river, just downstream of the cooling towers is the Severn Warehouse – now part of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum (where I used to work). This building has much smaller towers, but they are impressive in their own way. Built in the gothic style by the Coalbrookdale Company in 1834, it was used to store the factory’s iron goods until they could be shipped by barge to Bristol and thence out to the wide world. You can see the tramway down to the wharfage (bottom left). A veritable citadel of industry then, though a spot of weeding looks to be called for up in the castellations:
If you would like to take a very interesting walk around the Ironbridge Gorge there is an excellent trail guide HERE
Roof Squares See Becky’s very unusual Portuguese bread oven
Six Word Saturday And some marvellously commemorative artwork from Debbie
Tish Farrell 
Marvellous towers, Tish! I agree…Cooling Towers are part of our Industrial heritage
They were wonderful when they were lit up at night during the 1979 Iron Bridge bicentenary celebrations.
Wow! I can imagine…1979? Going back some….
Yes indeed. Long long ago in the Severn Gorge…
So do I!
😊
I love that building. I thought it was a church, at first.
It does have a church-look too with those windows.
It really does! 🙂
Very interesting.How odd that the building would look more like a church than a industrial business..
Some point might be being made here. Most of the Darby family of ironmasters were Quakers and as such banned from belonging to any profession in England. They made their mark in the industrial world by trusting and doing business with fellow Quakers. By the fourth generation of Darby ironmasters, one branch of the family, Francis son of the bridge builder aspired to higher social acceptability by becoming an Anglican. I seem to remember he built the church in Coalbrookdale; the Severn Warehouse would have been built during his life-time.
More notes of interest. Thank you
you’re welcome 🙂
Oh, my goodness, that museum building!!!
janet, who’s off to work
Have a good day!
I think it’s those big crosses which give it the churchy look. I could be wrong, but … Did they have a special prayer room to try and keep the water from flooding?
Ha! They were Quakers, so I guess they took things very philosophically
There are some old cooling towers in Soweto – Part of the Orlando coal fired power station. They are still in use, but not quite for their original purpose!
https://www.google.com/search?q=soweto+cooling+towers&sa=X&rlz=1C2CAFA_enPT621PT621&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ved=0ahUKEwj3wLWj_cbbAhWqAMAKHS4oCroQsAQIOw&biw=1366&bih=662
Are they really going to demolish the towers etc for housing?
It would be so fabulous to have the Soweto treatment on the towers, but housing land seems to be their future. It’s a fabulous spot, though a housing estate would be a blot just there on the edge of a World Heritage site.
Much like the way they tend to carve up land in many places.
The world need another shopping centre, dontcha know?
And every one you go into, wherever it is, looks as if it’s struggling to do business.
Yes! The rentals are so high and I suspect that these days many of the tenants are amputees -as it costs them an arm or a leg.
One near us – Park Meadows – is bang opposite an old established Centre – (Eastgate) that is currently undergoing more expansion.
Anyhow the Kensington Golf Course – a green lung in the middle of the area with hundreds of trees – was carved up to make way for several townhouse complexes and Park Meadow (no meadow in sight of course)
Aside from the big boys ( A supermarket and fruit and veg hyper store) the rest of the tenants turnover on a regular basis.
However, some do manage to stay in business for almost a month!
😉
Real estate and money laundering come to mind.
Oh, I love brick! And another snippet of autobiography
My history in snippets – I rather like that as a notion 🙂
Micro-memoirs are all the rage on the non-fiction writing site I follow!
Superb shot of the towers. Hope they stay. Less keen on housing but maybe they could create flats inside the towers!!!
PS I love the warehouse that’s now a museum, and the clever way they let the water out after floods. Quakers were and are an amazing movement.
OH and I were discussing the towers last night. We think they should be protected as part of our industrial heritage and become part of the Gorge museums. We also thought that it would be fitting to take people across the river by coracle from the site you mention. A proper Ironbridge experience! We then got on to canals as you do and wondering what happened to the ones around Shrewsbury…
The case of the missing canals – Hm. Must look into it 🙂