If you’ve ever driven into Sheffield from the M1, you’ll be familiar with the Tinsley Cooling Towers – a piece of industrial landscape that’s become one of the city’s most famous landmarks. For now at least.
You see, the owners want to demolish them, while the good guys (headed up by Go, supported by Channel 4) want to turn it into an open art space. Demolition is certainly looking the most likely option, so to win hearts and minds, Go is opening a shop for Cooling Towers-related merchandise.
A range of artists/designers have contributed work, including Kid Acne,
Phlegm, Syd & Mallorys, Royal Stock, Conway & Young and People
Will Always Need Plates – who have designed this limited edition
Cooling Towers plate.
Just 100 available, which will be sold in the Cooling Towers
Collectibles shop. The shop (at Millennium Galleries, Arundel Gate,
Sheffield) opens on Saturday 12th April 2008, and runs for two weeks
from 9-5 every day (11 on Sundays). Do your bit for the towers – and
bag a future collectible too.
The towers are all that remains of Blackburn Meadows power station, now occupied by the enormous Meadowhall Centre but I can’t remotely raise my gander at the prospect of their demolition.
Go are big fans of the brutalist, Le Corbusier-inspired Park Hill flats which tower over the city. As it goes, so am I. Unlike them I’d much rather it hadn’t fallen into the hands of private developers, a process which has cost the city nearly one thousand homes. Whilst I cannot recall precise figures at this distance approximately 24,000 people waiting for a council house of their own. I won’t hold my breath for their limited-edition plate.
If Go wish to mourn the loss of the Tinsley towers then let us also weep for the thousands of publicly-owned properties, once the highest proportion of any city in the land, now either sold off or demolished and never replaced. That, unlike the remnants of Blackburn Meadows, is the heritage of Sheffield we should treasure.