Threads Through Sheffield

Last Saturday ( 12th April 2008 ) the Cooling Towers Collectibles Co. Stall opened for business in Sheffield’s city centre Millennium Galleries. Its aim to commemorate and mark the Tinsley Cooling Towers as Sheffield’s own unique pair of landmarks, by producing products to celebrate them before their expected passing, when they will be demolished for good and lost forever.

At the agreed 9am opening time there was already a queue of about 30 people waiting to purchase their piece of Cooling Tower memorabilia. People came from all over the UK to wait in line. Within an hour the queue was making its way down the corridor towards the Winter Gardens. By lunch the stall had sold all of it’s limited stock - which included: 100 plates, 250 tea cups, 25 screen prints, 50 pairs of oak models, 50 paper make your own cooling tower kits, 50 t-shirts, 80 cotton bags, 20 jigsaws, and many a postcard. The 2 week predicted stall life was cut down to just over 4 hours.

My thanks go to the two Toms from Go (www.dontgo.co.uk) who organised the event and gave me the opportunity to distribute the ‘Make your own Cooling Tower’ kit and the small oak pairs of cooling towers. Hopefully they have gone to good homes (not ebay - as some of the plates have!!!) that will cherish them and hold onto them for some time to come.

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”

(Amended Newton’s third law)

The Tinsley Cooling Towers are still standing but it would seem for not much longer, Eon are determined that they will not make it to see the summer of 2008.

E.ON UK Press Releases

01 February 2008 16:00
Preparations ongoing for demolition of the Tinsley cooling towers

Plans to bring down the Tinsley Towers are ongoing, with discussions continuing between E.ON UK, the Highways Agency, and other interested parties in preparation for an expected spring/summer demolition.Mark Maisey, E.ON UK Property Manager, said: “We’ve been working with a number of technical specialists on getting the final approvals finalised for demolition and now we’re looking to pin down a date that best suits everybody.

“It’s a big project and we want to ensure minimum disruption, which is why it’s taking some time but, naturally, we will share the demolition date with everyone as soon as we have it confirmed.”

Are circuses a provisional monument to cities on the move (i.e. changing cities) and if so, how do their provisional moments affect the urban environment?

Therefore, are the Tinsley Cooling Towers a provisional monument and/or moment for Sheffield?

Provisional components:

The Graffitied Iron Bridge -

Salavaged from the closed Brightside train station, less than half a mile down the tracks from the site, the iron bridge connects the Circus School with the Cooling Tower whilst reconnecting the public with its hidden and ‘out of bounds’ surroundings. The bridge also offers a readable sign from passing trams and trains, as well as marking the gateway to the urban parkland beyond.

The Wrapped Steel Pylon -

An existing redundant pylon found on site is retained and wrapped in the remnants of used circus tent fabric, providing a circus teaching space for aerial gymnastics, at the same time, replicating the performance heights achievable inside the cooling tower. The pylon also punctuates the low lying circus roof; enabling a high rigging point for external performances in the summer months.

The Repaired Concrete Cooling Tower -

Housed within cooling tower 6 (the one with diamond vents at the top, as opposed to chequered rectangles) the circus will appropriate this space as a performance venue for the Arts.

The Floating Timber Roof -

A reciprocal frame roof structure made out of reclaimed railway sleepers and telegraph poles spans 35 metres and provides a flexible circus training hall. The Circus school’s roof structure, which forms the main building component, is to reflect the many threads, facets and smaller elements that make up the complex web of Interdependence. The proposed structure, likened to an indeterminate timber cloud, is to hover above the circus performers, connecting and uniting all the spaces, functions and everyday moments under one provisional roof.

Since the beginning of this project, one quote from an interview I conducted with a circus school director about circus schools, stood firm in my memory when he described their role as “one field, many tents”. The wider project together with the designed circus school building, inside and out, attempts to hold on to this simple paradigm.

I met with Go! Sheffield just before Christmas to discuss ways of celebrating the Tinsley Cooling Towers and hopefully to create a means by which to remember them after they are gone. They have decided to put some effort into creating limited Cooling Tower memorabilia and selling it from a stall somewhere prominant in the city centre. One such product I am proposing is a ‘Make your own Cooling Towers’ paper lantern kit:

“With a little patience, you too can create your own cooling towers, to stand watch over you like the real ones have done over the last 70 years for Sheffield. Simply cut out the individual strips and attach to one another by placing a little glue on the tabs and overlaying to form the beautiful curved tower. You will require 32 strips (4 X A3 cut out sheets) to form one tower. Good luck”Tinsley Cooling Tower Cut Out Sheet

“Sheffield a city on the move…” can be heard in the opening scenes of the cult 1997 film: The Full Monty, where a 1970’s council promotional video is applauding the great steps into the future the South Yorkshire city was making. Little did they know how literal this is turning out to be…”Global climate change is also leading to changes in the seasonal behaviour and geographical location of fauna and flora. The change in temperature is equivalent to the UK moving south at 20 metres a day.”(Hillman, M. ‘How We Can Save the Planet’, Penguin Group, London, 2004)Rose Migration - Sheffield to Milan in 100 yearsThe map is a doctored google earth image which illustrates how far Sheffield would move if travelling at 20 metres a day.100 years can be considered quite some time, especially when you think where human kind was 100 years ago in 1908. None the less, the environment is changing on a daily basis and we must face the fact that we are directly and indirectly responsible for the last 100 years substantial increase in greenhouse gas emissions, but more importantly, also for the next 100 years and beyond of emissions.Even though some environmental disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis can happen in an instant, changes to climate happen relatively slowly which means that any ‘answer’ to climate change won’t be seen over night as some greenhouse gases take hundreds of years to naturally disappear from our atmosphere. Unfortunately the chain of events that has led to this current state started over 100 years ago in the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, but carries on today in ever more energy intensive lifestyles. Further demands on the 21st Century Western lifestyle may mean a city like Sheffield may have Milan’s climate sooner than we think, if a collective response isn’t implemented immediately.

Whilst in Edinburgh I also visited The Storytelling Centre on the Royal Mile, designed by Malcom Fraser Architects. Sat inside I found myself eating a very spicy pumpkin and chickpea soup and reading an article in the Guardian Saturday Newspaper entitled: ‘London Fields’ by Robert Macfarlane. Fortunately I have not got a ’storytelling’ voice so I wasn’t sat in any circle, just simply at a solid hardwood table away from the slushy weather outside.The article is about the London 2012 Olympics, or more specifically about the fields it is in the process of devouring. The article is accompanied by a page of blurry and eery photographs taken by Stephen Gill, on a camera he bought for 50p in Hackney 3 years ago. The article is worth a read and that is why I have attached it to this entry. London Fields - Arts Review, Saturday Guardian, 08.12.07My personal interest is the similarities faced by my site in Sheffield. The Tinsley Cooling Towers site is about to be sentenced back to being a powerstation by its landowners Eon (Powergen). The natural wildlife habitat that has been allowed to grow due to the site’s relative inactivity has flourished in a city that is still licking its environmental and economical wounds from the departure of it’s steel industry. What also seems quite cruel and careless is that the communities of Tinsley, Carbrook, Brightside and Wincobank, who already suffer from some of the lowest health standards in the country, let alone Sheffield are to be sentenced to inhaling further toxins from the new powerstation. With the busy M1 motorway on their doorstep, more and more children are being diagnosed with breathing difficulties, so the proposal of a new powerstation is not going to exactly ease the situation.Rather than filling the site once again (see Meadowhall!!!) why not leave these as green lungs for the surrounding communities. Firstly make them accesible, (suspended bridges, cycle paths, waterways) rather than filling them once again and then secondly give them some extra reasons/activity for people to walk through (a circus school perhaps, a carboot, a festival?, a campsite, a rose field? maybe all of the above?)The site needs more than just a single occupation, and the same applies for the London fields that will be filled with Olympic themed ‘things’. Anything less and the site will all too easily become static and stagnant, essentially boring, or even worse dejected by the local community who need it most.