It was good to see the Tinsley Cooling Towers in Sheffield fighting back this week-end and refusing to lie down.



Part of the second tower refuses to lie down. It was later demolished by bulldozers.

Despite the Big Art Project's committed support the passionate TowerLovers of Sheffield were unable to save their cool towers. Energy corporation EON, who own the site, have promised £0.5M to fund a public art work on the site. That's an identical amount to the estimated cost of making the towers safe.

Meanwhile, the passions around the twin towers remain anything but cool, as illustrated, by way of example, by The Sesquipedalist:

"Even though they’re the oldest standing example of hyperboloidal cooling towers in the UK and even though they were probably the largest of their kind when built in 1939, the cooling towers at Tinsley would be of considerably less interest if they were in a Lincolnshire field, or on the Northumberland coast. But they’re not. They’re a few metres from the M1, symbolising the transition from “The South” to “The North” (and back) to millions of motorists. I remember going to visit my grandparents in Sheffield in the ‘70s. Peering out of a brown Ford Cortina’s rear window, I knew we were “nearly there” when I saw at close quarters these Brobdingnangian salt and pepper pots. A matching pair no less, oozing iconicity from their concrete pours. The kind of imbued iconicity that’s been invested in by a shared memory over decades of proud “Made in Sheffield” tradition rather than blinging stainless steel meaninglessness, designed in Apathy and built in Elsewhere."
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Photo courtesy of Andy Coe

"We could have changed the way people look at this city. And they didn't let us." - here's a great account by Alexandra Topping from The Guardian of Toms Keeley & James' dogged campaign to transform industry into art.

" From the window of the Sheffield Supertram, Tom James watches despondently as the city's out-of-town shopping centre, Meadowhall, comes into view. Just beyond this mecca of consumerism, with its Disney-style dome and legions of parked cars, rises an altogether different landmark. The Tinsley cooling towers - bleak, elegant, real - are often the first and last thing people see as they enter and leave the city. But soon, like Sheffield's industrial golden age, they will be consigned to history, demolished to make way for a new power station. James reflects: "Imagine, when the towers are gone, Meadowhall will be the only thing you'll be able to see from the tram and the M1. How depressing."

Over the last three years, the 1940s towers have become symbolic of the battle for the city's soul - between those determined to create a 21st-century gleaming metropolis and those intent on preserving and celebrating some of the city's industrial heritage.

At the heart of that battle are Tom James and Tom Keeley, self-proclaimed "post-industrial city lovers" in their mid-20s. For two and a half years, they have been campaigning to have the redundant 76 metre-high towers, which stand just 17 metres from the motorway, transformed into a space for public art. "The idea was to transform the cooling towers into something amazing," Keeley says. "Our Angel of the North - something that would really make people think about Sheffield differently". "

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Went in to Our Lady of Muswell school in North London on Friday to talk to 60 year 5 students (c.10 yrs old) about the Big Art Project [I go once a year to talk about whatever I am working on at Channel 4 at the time - last year was My New Home and the year before was the Big Roman Dig].

I showed them 3 of the Watch This Space Three Minute Wonder short films broadcast a few weeks ago on Channel 4 - the ones featuring the sites in St Helens, Sheffield and Burnley - and we spent a few minutes getting members of the two classes to show where all the sites were on a map (Burnley was the one that really tested them).

No-one in the two classes knew what a 'colliery' was and they were fascinated by the insight into the life of a coal miner. They also found the poem voice-over of interest (read by Johnny Vegas) as they'd been studying writing poetry this term in Literacy lessons.

On a show of hands, of the 60 ten year olds only 3 found the Sheffield cooling towers attractive (about a dozen of them had see the towers in real life). They did however find the notion of a landmark compelling and highlighted the London Eye as one they particularly associated with their city.

The Burnley film struck a chord with them because of the youth of the contributors. They liked the idea of improving your environment through art.

The films worked really well in the classroom as a springboard for conversation enabling us to cover a lot of ground in an hour and a bit - from history (e.g. the great public art project of the First World War memorials across the UK) to geography (e.g. so where exactly is the Isle of Mull?) to technology (how to use the Big Art Mob mobile blogging dimension of the project) to PHSE (e.g. the transvestite contributor in the Sheffield film).

Photo above courtesy of UKphoto.tv on Big Art Mob