The corporate vandals of Tinsley

There was something faintly satisfying about the fact that one of the Tinsley cooling towers refused to lie down and die after this morning’s 3am demolition job by the E On energy company. The 76-metre high towers, situated just 17 metres from the M1, were well known to anyone who has ever lived in, visited or passed by Sheffield. The ‘Angel of the North’ artist, Antony Gormley, called them ‘the Stonehenge of the carbon age’ and campaigners have battled to keep them as icons of our industrial heritage ever since E On made it clear it wanted them gone.

Those campaigners succeeded in getting the towers selected as one of seven sites for Channel 4’s forthcoming Big Art Project. (You can read more about the project, the Tinsley towers and much else which I am involved with as a writer, in my article ‘Public art and Perspex panels’ in the current issue of Red Pepper.) Today’s early-morning explosives brought down one of the towers but left part of the other still standing - like a single finger stuck up to the corporate vandals who blew it up.