Tinsley Cooling Towers

The Tinsley Cooling Towers which stood by the M1 opposite Meadowhall in Sheffield in the north of England have now gone. In January and February 2008, while the huge local and national controversy about their impending demolition still raged, I was commissioned by Sheffield City Council to find out what the towers meant to the people who live in Tinsley and to represent this in some publically accessible visual form.

I engaged local residents in lengthy and often heated conversations – on the streets, in the bookies, the local pub (the Fox & Duck), Highgate Clinic, the local library, Tinsley Youth Club, Tinsley Forum and Tinsley Green – about how they perceive the towers, what they mean to them, and the place they have had in their lives.

The result was the set of postcards you are about to see. I chose the multi-view postcard format because I found Tinsley to be such a multi-view place, and because the genre is instantly familiar and accessible. In contrast to the usual images of the towers viewed from Meadowhall against the backdrop of the motorway, all the photographs were taken from within the area of Tinsley - many  by local residents. The postcards were delivered through the letterbox of every Tinsley resident, and children from the local school sent the one they had provided the artwork for (in sessions run at the local junior school by Anne Saleh of Tinsley Forum) to every corner of the globe.

This project was organised by the Sheffield-based cultural development agency Eventus, and funded by Arts Council England as part of the "Creative Places" project, which aims to integrate culture into the Housing Market Renewal programme.