I’m on a train to Stoke-on-Trent as I write this, headed for an exhibition and series of workshops about decommissioning twentieth-century power stations.
This is of course an entirely obvious thing for a playwright to be doing, right?
Early last year, I began research for an ACE-funded play based on the social, economic and political history (locally and nationally) of Fawley Power Station. This week, after a long, long pause due to all sorts of family pressures, I’m finally starting to write the first draft.
Fawley was once the world’s biggest and first automated oil-fuelled power station, sat incongruously for 50 years on the edge of the New Forest and Solent water.
At the time of its decommissioning in 2013, its site footprint was hemmed in on one side by a National Park, on the other by several marine SSSIs, on another by the sprawling ESSO refinery and just around the corner, by the rural villages of Calshot and Fawley.
Environment, industry, agriculture, community: these forces have been in conflict since 2013, whilst the future of the site has been decided upon through a combination of economics, politics, pressure for housing, and development panache.
Originally the site didn’t even exist as land – at least not land firm enough to be built upon.
The early 1950s saw a government programme compulsory purchasing a huge area of salt-marsh and surrounding fields from the Cadland Estate’s landowner Maldwin Drummond.
The government then dredged millions of tons of material from the Solent onto the marsh, as they prepared for some kind of huge industrial undertaking.
They knew they wanted something to happen there years before it actually did.
It’s clear from digging in the National Archive that a certain ‘something’ was always in the government’s mind. This has led to speculation that a ‘failed’ Isle of Wight nuclear station, proposed in 1959, was only ever a ‘decoy’ to make plans for Fawley look more palatable to the public.
The decision on Fawley took a couple more years to come.
Between 1961-62 a series of proposals and oppositions were passed rapidly between the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), the Ministry for Power, and local landowners, agricultural tenants, rural dwellers and their district and county councils in the New Forest and Hampshire.
In May 1962 a final (and fairly small-scale) hearing led to the green light for Fawley Power Station. It took place in the Jubilee Hall in the village of the same name. The rest, as they say, is history.
But this is part of the problem.
There isn’t a definitive history yet – not one that’s been collected together, at least. The process of trying to research the power station from multiple angles made that clear.
In turn, the decisions that have taken place about the site more recently – the planning permission for the ambitious digital industries and green living exemplar town ‘Fawley Waterside’ led by Aldred Drummond (yes, Maldwin’s son, who bought back the site 65 years on), and the demolitions that have followed including of the iconic 198m cooling tower – have left some people feeling like their voices have fallen through the cracks.
That’s ultimately where my playwriting process tries to position itself – diving into the cracks to unearth and express something that hasn’t yet been shared.
I love listening to stories, researching their contexts, and then distilling and reflecting them back to the communities that have shared them with me.
It’s crucial therefore that they’re also invited in each step of the way, to interrupt, question, correct and encourage as they see fit. They are the experts in their experience – I’m the expert in turning them into theatrical experiences.
It’s a process that requires time. It can be bruising when it fails but is incredibly rewarding when it succeeds.
My play Stacked is created in response to the stories told, memorabilia shared, experiences witnessed and tales told by the community connected to Fawley Power Station. It’s also informed by my own archival digging, and is a version of the site’s history stretching from the 1950s and then on into the future in 2030.
And so it was ironic that a month ago (see photo above) – and 60 years on from the hearing – I was sitting in that exact same village hall where the green light for Fawley was given, having not dissimilar conversations.
Along with project partners Forest Forge Theatre Company I was sharing my story treatment for Stacked in front of ex-power station engineers, service personnel, ex-tour guides, local councillors, retired architects and planners, and a woman who as a girl looked on whilst her ‘childhood playground’ of boat jetties, wildlife and wild swimming was co-opted by a post-war government programme aiming to secure the UK’s energy independence.
The story itself was warmly welcomed: an ensemble play that dashes through time but focuses on one character’s relationship with Fawley from childhood through to his long-term employment on the station, on to old age then and finally to his grandchild, tracing both a personal and spiritual legacy connected to the idea of energy creation. This was also given a green-light (I’m happy to say).
It was the conversations it sparked that ended up actually fuelling the meeting.
We had people who were completely for and completely against the new development.
We had people who were completely for and completely against the original power station being built.
We had people who were completely behind and completely disbelieving of the developer’s amelioration regarding environmental benefits and social housing.
We had people who were grieving the loss of the chimney (or ‘stack’), and people who said they’d done a little dance for joy when it came down.
We had people who were lovers of industrial architecture and people who firmly believed that nature should have taken back control of the site.
I was also asked what I felt the play’s message was: what it was trying to tell people.
At the time, I gave a stock dramaturgical answer – one that I believe in, but one that was a little dissatisfying at the time, perhaps – that I don’t believe in plays carrying a singular ‘message’.
I mean that’s also true! I do think the most interesting plays are the ones that dramatise difficult questions through emotionally engaging narratives. They send audiences into the night wondering with whom the justice of the story truly lies, asking what they would do in the same situation.
With the extremes of opinion in that village hall encompassing 60-70 years of history, this also felt like a just treatment of their collective experiences: asking who’s right, not telling them who I think is right.
But the answer I perhaps should have given was that the play is exploring how we cope with loss. It’s asking how we can say goodbye well.
How do we say goodbye to things that have left us forever? People. Places. Buildings. Communities. A way of life that will never return.
How do we do that in a way that is healthy, realistic, balanced, releasing, just? Is that even objectively possible? Or are our values and memories – and therefore our judgement – forever clouded by nostalgia unless we evolve in some way?
In the play, the main character Eddie carries a grief from the age of 10 that is only released in his 80s, when he can’t bear to carry it any longer. His mantra of ‘just keeping on’ ends up with devotion to the power station, but diversion from his emotional truth.
When the power station falls, the barriers to his own grief fall as well. It’s only in dealing with the loss of the site and evolving his perspective that he can confront his own demons.
To say goodbye well, he has to change.
All of which comes full circle to my trip up to Stoke-on-Trent. The exhibition and workshops I’m attending are part of the Keele University-led Decommissioning the Twentieth Century.
This is a wider academic and creative programme exploring change: how to go about decommissioning 20th century power stations more sympathetically, in terms of the people, environments, economies, histories and potential futures that surround them. How to say goodbye well.
That’s the emotional core of Stacked for me. But there’s a political dimension too.
The play’s title is a nod to both the 198m structure that defined Fawley for its working life and beyond, visible from many many miles away, and the question of power when it comes to conflicts between progress, industry and the individual.
As more than one of the participants commented, this seems to be a story from the outset of communities being ‘done to’ rather than genuinely considered.
How do we think the odds are stacked – and when we think we know, what’s our response going to be?
Stacked has been developed with kind support from Arts Council England, Forest Forge Theatre Company, New Forest Heritage Centre, Waterside Heritage, expert in Creative Histories Dr Will Pooley at the University of Bristol, and the many people who have contributed to the research.