I struggled for a minute to work out quite where to start with this one. Let me take you back a few months. Dr H and I had seen enough of Alcan to be ‘industrially satisfied’ for a while, and during some downtime where we finally managed to go and do some of the local stuff that’ll always be there, the topic was raised of what the next big project would be.
Allow me to introduce to you Celanese Acetate, formerly British Celanese and then Courtaulds’ Spondon plant, a vast acetate flake and tow factory by the banks of the river Derwent on the outskirts of Derby. The factory itself dates all the way back to 1914, and was at one point Derby’s biggest employer, with some 20,000 workers crossing the river onto the site each day. The factory was capable of producing 35,000 tons of Acetate Tow each year, and closed in November 2012, with about 350 workers losing their jobs. One thing we both noted as we researched the site’s closure was that it was partly due to the closure of the power station that supplied steam to the site, a 214mw gas-fired plant trading under the company name Derwent Cogeneration. Like I said, noted. But we had bigger fish to fry, as some more googling at this point had shown us a little of what to expect from Celanese, and we were sold immediately.
So a plan was hatched, and, confidence high after the fairly chilled out times we’d been having, it was decided to simply drive down and have a bash.
Of course, as is so often the case these things are not that simple at first. As we observed the factory from the car, we could clearly see that it was crawling with workers, going in and out of just about every building we could see. We’d driven quite a way and a few of our other leads just didn’t match up to this so we elected to sleep in the car and try our luck again just before first light. After a somewhat toxic few hours sleep (I implore you, never spend more than an hour in a room that is also occupied by Dr H’s arsehole, it’s even worse in a car) we got up and walked the perimeter again, dismayed to see that the factory was in much the same state as it had been the night previous. Busy.
“Ah well, shall we take a look at this power station then?”
So we’re there doing a right old rurex across fields and sneaking past caravans, we were joking that the pikies had set up camp already but in reality we might not have been far wrong, especially considering how alert the security guards seemed to be for 6:30am, even getting on to this little bridge round the back took more effort than it should have done, and as we stood at the fence counting cameras the security van drove round, too close not to notice us, but didn’t stop.
We elected to return at a later date for another look.
So before I skip to our next trip, I’ll just elucidate a little on a few events between the two. We were pretty convinced that this was going to be the first power plant of the year, but then the whole Roosecote/chimney affair happened and we gained a confidence boost like no other. Not only had we proved to ourselves it was possible to do these places even considering how well secured they are supposedly, it might even, sometimes, not be a complete pain in the arse to do so. Cocky thinking eh? The other big thing that happened was that we discovered that this power plant supposedly had a 60mw steam turbine which got us both going, looking on the maps and trying to establish where it was - there were two main candidates, the green block at the centre of the south part of the site, flanked by the 4 gas turbines, or the peculiar large concrete building just to the north. In fact, trying to work this out made us re-read the wiki we’d already gone through countless times, and, weirdly, for the first time, the penny dropped that the concrete building was actually the remains of a much older station. I’ll do the quoting Wikipedia history bit now:
Spondon H? Sounds pretty good eh. Gooooooogle.
So basically the set up is we’ve got a 1950’s boiler house, turbine hall and control room, mostly mothballed but retained for the 3 10mw steam turbines to run off the backpressure from the 1995 CCGT Station. Cool.
Our next trip’s target was clearly the older station, the plan being to get in before light and run away when we were done, standard procedure really, however the reality of it was that the station was excellently sealed with padlocks, closed windows, cameras all over it and an ominous alarm box. With light breaching the horizon we decided to see if we could hit up the main factory, but although we were walking around in pretty much daylight with all these really cool massive old industrial buildings around us, it was clear that the section of factory we’d walked into had clearly been closed some time earlier - the floors we could see through windows were stripped and empty, and all doors sealed, so we beat our retreat, vowing that we would at least have to come back once more for Derwent.
Ok, well done making it this far, it’s nearly picture time. We finally returned, and with a concrete plan, we set about conquering the newer CCGT plant. The explore itself was high adrenaline industrial action, clocking cameras, moving amongst machinery, trying to work out other ways past locked doors and finally getting into the green building only to find that the first door to our left (clearly labelled "Control Room") was security’s office, with the telly on, but they weren’t in. Not knowing where they were put us further on edge, and it wasn’t long before we were making our way out, satisfied that we’d seen enough and we could call the 2nd power plant of the year conquered.
Some pictures, as a reward for bearing with me.
Derwent Power Station
Water Treatment Plant
General Electric Frame 6 MS6001B gas turbine
Heat recovery system, basically a boiler which uses the exhaust gases from the gas turbines to heat water to steam which would then drive the 60mw steam turbine with any excess steam being sold to Celanese to drive Spondon H's 3 10mw units.
Water Treatment Plant
General Electric Frame 6 MS6001B gas turbine
Heat recovery system, basically a boiler which uses the exhaust gases from the gas turbines to heat water to steam which would then drive the 60mw steam turbine with any excess steam being sold to Celanese to drive Spondon H's 3 10mw units.
And then we had another penny drop moment. On the way back out, like a bolt from the blue, we suddenly both simultaneously knew how to get inside the old station. To say it was sketchy would be an understatement, but we knew it would work. We made plans for one last visit, just a week before we were both due to leave our respective positions for pastures anew.
Spondon H Power Station
And so of course, finally, our luck ran out big time. I’ve written a whole lot already and there’s a lot more I could write, but suffice to say, once in the boiler house it was epic on a stick. Everything had Metropolitan Vickers plates, there were rail tracks leading to the backs of the old boilers and stairs led up to more pipes and machinery. Work was clearly being undertaken to slowly start dismantling equipment in the station, and we set to work with the cameras, I personally was in awe. We had not had 5 minutes to take stock of our situation though before Dr H, understandably keen to push for turbines, came sprinting across the floor full pelt.
“Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit”
“Good shit?”
“Bad shit. PIR. Blinking.”
“Fuck. I’ll just see what’s round this corner then we’ll go. Look, boilers!”
WEEEWAAAAWEEEEWAAAAWEEEEWAAA
“FUCK, RUN.”
“Good shit?”
“Bad shit. PIR. Blinking.”
“Fuck. I’ll just see what’s round this corner then we’ll go. Look, boilers!”
WEEEWAAAAWEEEEWAAAAWEEEEWAAA
“FUCK, RUN.”
Less than 2 minutes later we were buried under a pipe gantry outside the station in a pile, trying desperately to look exactly like nothing whatsoever, with security less than 10 metres away, describing to each other exactly what we had just performed, and bearing down on us with bright flashlights. We didn’t move a fucking muscle for 10 minutes, then, at the slam of two doors, we both bolted. My camera was still out and in the 15 seconds it took me to get it away we’d got separated. I bolted half the length of the site, apparently straight past where Dr H had just scaled the fence, and crossed a bunch of pipe runs over culverts to get to the fence, at which point I used the cover of a tree from the road to climb over. I was on top of the spikes with a prime view as the police drove onto the site in convoy and I dropped, thanking god when I ran almost immediately into Dr H, then cursing in almost the same breath as the sweep of the powerful police lights cast us into relief. We dropped into the undergrowth, and with a couple of kilometers back to the car, I pushed on, assuming the Doc was behind me. Apparently we were now separated again, there were police everywhere, and with a final great sense of defecation meeting oscillation, I detected a new menace to our escape: a flying, whubbing, searchlighting bastard kind of menace.
Fuck me. I don’t really know how we got out of that one, but we did. I punctured a leg on barbed wire and cracked a rib, and we were both bleeding from various scratches after recklessly mowing through the undergrowth with our eyes fixed on the sky. Once in the car, we couldn’t stop checking the rearview mirror all the way to the motorway. Still, there’s nothing quite like getting away with it, is there!? Anyway, we kept our eyes on the news for the next few weeks, read the public police reports and it seems that after absolutely no mention of anything anywhere, the heat is low enough that having discussed it with Dr H this can at least go here in 'semi-public' for now. I’m no longer based in the North and Dr H is no longer even UK based so Celanese will probably require some more local attention, but trust me it will be worth it when the time is right.
For now, here’s 4 film shots from the boiler house of a 1950’s Coal Fired Beast.
Cheers for reading.
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