Atomic Albion by Tom Bolton — a brutal, beautiful journey

The village of Wellesbourne in Warwickshire lies a few miles from Defence Munitions Kineton, western Europe’s largest ammunition depot. Growing up in the village in the 1970s, Tom Bolton was “well aware that the base would be targeted in the first wave of a nuclear strike”.

That upbringing as a “nuclear child” is an impetus for his tour of Britain’s 16 nuclear power stations. As Bolton explains, the first generation of stations, which mushroomed around the UK’s coast in the 1960s, was based on technology developed for producing military plutonium, and the links between the sectors endure. The sites Bolton visits are as richly illuminating of their times as the Norman castles whose domineering bulk they evoke.

Monumentality, inscrutability, loneliness — that is their typology. As Bolton says, ‘We have nothing else like them’

Atomic Albion is in essence a travel book, taking the reader, chapter by chapter, to the remoter reaches of the country, including the massive reprocessing site at Sellafield on the coast of Cumbria in England (“haunted by an existential dread”), the decommissioned Trawsfynydd power station in Wales (“austere and beautiful”), and the defunct fast-breeder reactor at Dounreay, Scotland (a “baffling combination of strangeness and normality”). Bolton is nothing if not a completist and when, on page 234, he writes that “we intended to visit five more nuclear power stations”, even the most admiring reader might be forgiven for underlining the number and pencilling an exclamation mark next to it.

But in fact it is precisely this iterative quality that gives Atomic Albion its power. Its narrative trajectory is less linear than circular. Time and again we visit the down-at-heel feeder village where the promise of nuclear jobs and regeneration has never quite been fulfilled. Time and again we approach the picture-postcard estuary or headland, as the gargantuan blight heaves into view.

If we do tend to behold these places with dread, it may be for the simple reason that their setting announces that they pose a risk to life. One of the resources a nuclear power station demands, besides uranium, water and labour, is remoteness. In the unlikely event of an accident — and Atomic Albion is riddled with reports of cracks, leakages and other shuddering near-misses — the fewer neighbours the better.

Bolton, who works in architecture and urban design, is admiring of some of the early stations, designed, according to the influential landscape architect Sylvia Crowe, to evoke feelings that are “cosmic rather than terrestrial” and to express “the harnessing of universal forces to the service of the earth”.

There is, he says, no universal nuclear typology, but “their architecture has become increasingly anonymous as the nuclear industry retreats in the face of public scrutiny, morphing from asset to liability. Pioneering, futuristic shapes designed to express a new, optimistic, technologically advanced world, have been replaced with paranoid structures designed to appear as dull as possible.”

Despite their hotchpotch architecture, however, the purpose of these 16 sites — some of the most costly and complex things ever built by humankind — is not mysterious. Monumentality, inscrutability, loneliness — that is their typology. What else can that towering concrete edifice or gargantuan dome be, in its pastoral setting, but a nuclear power station? As Bolton says, “We have nothing else like them.”

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Four years is a long time in the politics of nuclear power, and if it could be said in 2021, when Bolton made these journeys, that the industry was in retreat, it is no longer. As I was reading his gravely illuminating book, the government announced that Anglesey, Wales, would “host” the UK’s first small modular reactor nuclear power plant. A golden age is upon us once more.

Atomic Albion: Journeys Around Britain’s Nuclear Power Stations by Tom Bolton Strange Attractor Press £30, 360 pages

William Atkins is the author of ‘Exiles: Three Island Journeys’

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Letter in response to this article:

A power plant that evokes a prizewinning sculpture / From Lesley Chamberlain, London N6, UK