The Demolition of Rugeley Power Station

Today I went to photograph the demolition of Rugeley Power Station and it didn’t end well for me or the power station! I’ve never actually witnessed a demolition like this before so when I read about it in the local news, I was excited to make the short trip from Birmingham to Rugeley to witness the spectacle!

As with a lot of my recent photography, I decided I wanted to capture the historical moment on film - in particular medium format. It was also pretty obvious to me that I would need to use a camera that had some kind of ‘burst’ mode to fire off multiple shots, as the towers came down! Fortunately, I have a Mamiya 645 Pro with an autowinder which would do just the job!

I knew thing were off to a bad start when I arrived in Rugeley and couldn’t even see the huge cooling towers through the thick mist. After a week of glorious sunshine, it was almost comical that the weather would be this bad but also a little predictable. Nonetheless, I wondered the local streets looking for compositions.

I had an idea in my mind that I wanted to place some of the local houses or maybe even a bungalow in the foreground of the shots so that it would add to the scale of the size of the cooling towers. This proved a little more difficult than I first imagined as I just couldn’t find a composition that I was happy with!

With the demolition scheduled for 11.15am and that time fast approaching, I settled on a spot overlooking a local football pitch and much to my surprise, there was even a match on! Brilliant! I thought, this will certainly add to the foreground interest!

As the clock ticked towards the final seconds for the towers, the weather had not improved much and my fears of using an old film camera in the rain were suddenly more prevalent as I desperately tried to hide my camera under my jacket. The problem was, it’s such a manual process in terms of setting the camera for a shot that I really needed to have the camera ready to go - but the weather just wasn’t playing ball!

11.15am came and went. With every passing minute I had the constant battle of trying to keep the camera dry but need to take the camera out at just the right second (and also checking it was set up to shoot!). Then, with a huge bang, the moment was upon us and the towers quickly came down. I fired off multiple shots until the film was finished and so too were the towers. The wait was over and I felt relieved that it was all done and over.

A quick train journey home and straight to developing the film. This part of the process is almost as anxious as the shoot itself as there are still so many things that could go wrong! I was happy to see that there were images on the negatives but on closer inspection, I could seem that something wasn’t right. Later, after scanning the images, my fears were true - all of the ‘action’ shots were dull and hazy… my lens had clearly fogged up and although they were semi usable, I was more disappointed than anything.

In honesty, it’s one of those things that I should have been able to deal with but between rushing and my outright desire to shoot film - I only really have myself to blame. Fortunately, the final composition never really worked for me and I would have liked more football players to have been at that end of the pitch and obviously, better weather! However, that’s how these things go and more importantly than the images, it was still quite an experience!