Will Harvey | Reimagining the Future of Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station

Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Photograph as existing, Will Harvey.

Primary resident William Harvey is currently working on a creative research project that explores the future of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station.

…It’s 2030, A plume of dust and debris clouds the Nottingham skyline as Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station’s last cooling tower crumples like an over-dipped biscuit. FLASHBACK to the present day, and you’ll find our workshop: you are invited to creatively challenge the proposals for the future of Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station - before it’s too late.

Working in collaboration with artist Ryan Boultbee, they have been bringing people together to share their thoughts on the future of the last active coal-fired power station in the UK. As a piece of major infrastructure which supports the national grid, public participation involving the future of sites like Ratcliffe-on-Soar usually remains tokenistic. We wanted to raise awareness of this and also offer a different method of engagement, which we hope would generate unseen and alternative solutions to the current demolish and develop cycle. 

Using an architectural scale drawing, depicting the empty shell of a cooling tower, they encouraged everyone, individually and COLLECTIVELY, to share their ideas about what a future re-use of this, the most iconic, part of the infrastructure could be. This has so far produced a spectrum of ingenious ideas, including vertical farms, climbing walls, community housing, a giant game of snakes and ladders, nature reserve and a colossal pop-up cinema. All of which reflect the absurd yet, arguably beautiful monumentality of these structures. 

People vs Power Workshop at Primary, Will Harvey & Ryan Boultbee

“We believe that by working together, we can navigate towards an exciting scheme that benefits Nottingham, that not only remembers the industrial heritage of this site, but together with this evidences our climate change heritage.”The site faces demolition and redevelopment. The local development corporation proposes an incinerator and possibly even a gigafactory as replacements!? At one point an experimental nuclear fusion power station was proposed. Is this what local people want?

People vs. Power is a workshop project delivered by William Harvey and Ryan Boultbee, two creatives obsessed with the built environment, to discuss the uncertain future of our climate change heritage. Workshops have been delivered with Nottingham Contemporary, Broadway Gallery, Green Hustle, and Nottingham Youth Climate Assembly. If you’d like to find out more about the project, please get in touch with William by email. 

Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Power with the People, Will Harvey.

William Harvey has been researching the Power Station site for his MArch programme at the Centre for Alternative Technology, Wales. This has resulted in a dissertation paper - Beyond Coal Culture and a final design project Power With The People. Which have both influenced and been influenced by this collaboration. Power With The People is a proposal for the reconstruction of the site and its structures and buildings, treating them as ruins in parts, removing them in others and preserving the most iconic and/or useful pieces where appropriate. In this scheme the masterplan depicts a transformation of the approximately 125 hectare site into a melange of ecological, civic and green energy infrastructure, subverting existing pipework, pumps and buildings to facilitate new patterns of human and non-human culture. This is a celebration and amplification of what we have locally in the East Midlands accepting the scars of the past into the present for a more hopeful, inclusive and environmentally just future.