Threads Through Sheffield

(Images from www.28dayslater.co.uk)

Tower 7 has been recently scaled by a group of ‘urban explorers’, offering a tantalising glimpse of what only the birds have been able to savour till now.

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=27436

A fantastic piece of writing by Hinchcliffe and Hodgson (2007) inspired by the Tinsley Cooling Towers to be read by two people:

http://wordsaloud.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/so-cool-were-practically-dead-by-hinchcliffe-and-hodgson

“So cool we’re practically dead
Quadric hyperboloids!
That’s what we are.
A three dimensional continuous surface described by the mathematical equation
X squared over a squared, plus y squared over b squared, minus z squared over c squared = 1
We are thin shelled structures.
Maximum height and strength with minimum material.
A kind of “less is more” principle in practice.
And we are heavy.
Collossal actually and pressing down hard on an underpinning lattice of diagonal concrete pillars.
Not Doric or Ionic, just Iconic.
Tensile stress encircling two deep black cauldrons of what was once steaming hot water.
Turbulent, boiling rain.
A funny storm in an even funnier funnel!

Today, the two pools we still stand over are flat and stagnant.
Each one reflects a circular glimpse of sky, framed by the edge of our perforated crowns.
Light at the top of the funnel, not at the end of a tunnel.
We once took the heat out of it all
A very intricate process
Hot water, used to cool the turbines at Blackburn Meadows Power Station was pumped to the top of us.
Scalding and steaming, it cascaded down on the updraft of cooling air, sucked up by the pressure increase created in our pinched hyperbolic waists.
Now it appears we are a waste.

We are the last of seven you know?
Seven of us built between 1937 and ‘42
and only two of us left.
But Regal!
Majestic!
And Magnificent!
Advanced engineering
And Radical Architecture!
Presiding over Great Britain’s 1st motorway.
We altered its course forcing it to skirt around us as it rolled north.
That old M1 has kept us alive
They couldn’t blow us up because we’re too close to it
Only 48 feet away
But now the cleverly controlled implosion techniques of the 21st century, will be the downfall of us both.
Whatever happened to
RESPECT FOR ALL MONUMENTS