Decommissioning the Twentieth Century: Energy Landscapes, Heritage, and Community

This project investigates how humanities-driven, but co-produced practices can improve the environmental, cultural and social outcomes for communities affected by the changes to landscape, land-use and land assets associated with the past, present and future decommissioning of large twentieth-century industrial complexes.

Industrial Heritage - Decommissioning - Landscape - Participatory research - sense of place - co-creative - inter-disciplinary.

The United Kingdom recently passed ambitious targets to tackle climate change, requiring a radical transformation of the energy landscape over the next 30 years (HM Government, 2011, 69-73; Konadu, 2015; Price, 2018; Committee on Climate Change, 2019). Alongside new sites of power generation such as wind turbines and solar farms, this necessitates a rapid and complex process of land-use change, as the UK's vast 20th-century energy infrastructure is decommissioned, landscapes of electricity generation disappear, and the infrastructure of fossil-fuel production becomes redundant. These processes of landscape transformation have already begun, and the experience of the political decision to close many coal mines in the 1980s should alert us to the potentially disastrous consequences of decommissioning for local communities, cultures, environments and well-being (Johnstone and Hielscher, 2017; Foden et. al., 2014). This project provides an essential intervention for such sites, using cross-disciplinary arts and humanities methods to drive forward a more holistic and sensitive decision-making process for decommissioning.

Our project innovates by a) introducing co-creation as a humanities and arts driven contribution to land-use change decisions, b) by using inter-community networking as a core facilitating element of the research, and c) by understanding heritage and heritage planning as something that begins before the working life of industrial sites comes to an end (Avrami, 2000). Communities from three sites will join with academics to co-produce outputs and outcomes from the project. The sites have been chosen as examples of past, ongoing and future decommissioning - the former colliery of Chatterley-Whitfield on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent; the recently-closed oil power station at Fawley in Hampshire; and West Burton, one of two remaining coal power stations in the Trent Valley. Inter-community networking will enable the project and differing communities to take advantage of their respective experience and expertise in, for example, co-creative artistic practice and experience of heritage status at Chatterley-Whitfield, planning and professional expertise at Fawley, and aesthetic and visual presentation at West Burton. Bringing these groups together will provide continuity between three iterations of a two-day workshop, across which we and our stakeholders will improve co-creative methods as they are adapted to each site, to co-produce working documents that reflect the changing and dynamic character of heritage meaning across time. By bringing history, community engagement and contemporary questions about landscape together, we hope to create policy recommendations that help communities deal with the prospect and reality of declining twentieth-century energy infrastructure.

This research aims to provide a more inclusive a sensitive framework for the potentially traumatic process of decommissioning large energy infrastructure sites, summarise this process in a policy paper, and then disseminate that paper to relevant planning and heritage authorities, to inform a new process for decommissioning. It will benefit any community living near to, or otherwise in close connection with such sites (for example, through high employment rates), whether the site is already decommissioned, is in the process of being decommissioned, or faces decommissioning in the short to medium term. If the UK is to meet its climate-change targets, this is likely to apply to almost all its twentieth-century power-generation and oil infrastructure.

On a more immediate basis, the project will also benefit the three communities with a stake in the sites that the research is focussed on - Chatterley-Whitfield Colliery near Stoke-on-Trent, Fawley power station in Hampshire, and West Burton Power station in Nottinghamshire. These communities will be brought into contact with each others' differing expertises in the experience of decommissioning, the creative use of disused industrial sites, planning and policy, or aesthetic and cultural presentation. Through these connections, we will increase their resilience, and capability to manage complex processes of decommissioning and their aftermath.