Decommissioning the twentieth century

Ben Anderson / Matthew Kelly / Katrina Navickas / Ian Waites

In the decades after 1945, Britain witnessed a dramatic period of technological innovation and expansion. The state transformed the countryside with grids of pylons, huge concrete edifices, and a new era of extraction, while both rural and urban societies and economies adapted to the new cultures of energy, communication and leisure.
As these infrastructures—and the lives that inhabited them—are variously abandoned, repurposed or demolished, this book visits four distinct locations to consider how the countryside became modern, what these sites mean now, and how we might remember them.

Ben Anderson—Chatterley Whitfield Colliery, Stoke-on-Trent
Matthew Kelly—Fawley Power Station, Southampton Water
Katrina Navickas—Blackstone Edge, above Rochdale
Ian Waites—West Burton Power Station, near Gainsborough

Ben Anderson, Matthew Kelly, Katrina Navickas and Ian Waites are researchers on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project: ‘Decommissioning the Twentieth Century’