Distance: 1.7 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

Get the route: via Ordnance Surveys Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

Short circular walk starting and ending at Willington Railway Station heading out to the site of the former Willington Power Station with its five distinctive cooling towers.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Willington’s Rare Survival

When I lived in Yorkshire, and would come and go sometimes from Birmingham, a key landmark on the way up or down was the cooling towers of Willington Power Station.

They stand on the edge of the large village of Willington, just south of the Trent beneath Derby. The power station ceased producing power in stages between 1994 and 1999, meaning that by the time I first took notice of it out of the window of a Voyager on the way up to York in 2010, Willington had been closed for over 10 years.

The former Willington Power Station is distinctive and notable because almost all of the structures on site were demolished in the late 1990s and early 2000s shortly after it shut, all apart from five distinctive, nearly 100 metre tall, cooling towers arranged in a delta formation.

Willington Power Station had a pretty short operational life, having been constructed between 1954 and 1962, meaning that it only operated for less than 40 years. For much of that time it was a standby station, meaning that the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), who managed the production and distribution of electrical power prior to the beginning of its privatisation in 1990, kept it as a back-up, quickly bringing it online in the event of sudden surges in demand for power (half time during the FA cup final, the end of Coronation Street episodes, and the middle of Christmas day being amongst the classic “peaks”) and in the event of other power stations having to go offline.

A large part of the reason why it closed when it did, was because the privatised energy companies in the 1990s, focused primarily on profit rather than producing electricity for consumers, did not want to maintain a small fleet of standby stations, preferring instead to not have slack in the system and take a chance on power cuts.

By the same virtue it is the often bizarre logic of the market which has led to the Willington Power Station cooling tower’s survival as an eastern Midlands postindustrial landmark. There have been various plans to redevelop the site, some with (at least some of the) cooling towers, others without the cooling towers. So far none of them however, have come about, and despite a clamour for homes and space for logistics facilities in southern Derbyshire, this looks likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future.

Given the increasing rarity of the cooling tower as an architectural “type”, to use the experts language, given the fact that the UK after around 140 years of merrily burning coal to produce much of its power, has now largely pivoted away from the material. It seems increasingly likely, albeit far from inevitable, that after spending more than two decades in limbo, the Willington Power Station’s cooling towers will end up being a heritage amenity of one sort or another. Much like the former Clipstone Colliery headstocks in mid-Nottinghamshire.    

Stuck in limbo the former power station site has taken on the character of a nature reserve in some regards, as land left alone with limited human intervention is quickly want to. Even in the days when Willington was an active power station peregrine falcons were known to nest at the top of the power station and the site is doubtless home to copious other species, an unintentionally rewilded little cluster in the Trent valley.

Willington Power Station is also understandably a favourite with urban explorers, and occasionally filmmakers. These two things came together in 2015 when the cooling towers featured in an episode of the Channel 4 series of shorts Drones in Forbidden Zones, which consists of footage of the gargantuan cooling towers and surrounding wilderness taken by a drone, overlaid with an ominous soundtrack. Dramatic stuff.

The Walk

Get the route via: Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

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This circular walk to the five cooling towers that are the famous remains of Willington Power Station begins from Willington Railway Station.

Upon reaching Willington Railway Station, exit and head to the right into the centre of the village.

On reaching the main road turn right, walking past a chip shop in a small old building, possibly once part of the station.

Keep on walking along the road beside the railway line. 

Soon the bridge curves around sharply to the right. Here walk through a tunnel underneath the railway line.

On the far side keep on walking straight along the road.

As you walk, look out on the left hand side of the road for sports pitches and a footpath waymark pointing past the side of a Chinese takeaway onto the recreation field.

Once on the field walk straight ahead (I did not take any photographs of this stretch of the walk due to there being young children’s football practice in full flow). On the far side of the field turn right and walk around the edge of the field.

Partway across the field on the left you turn and follow a path past a red dog poo bin into a patch of scrubby trees.

Inside the trees you are back next to the busy Midland Mainline. Here the path curves around to the right and you follow it.

Walk along the path for some distance.

Presently the trees thin out and you approach the site of the former Willington Power Station. It is overgrown, with the tall cooling towers rising out of the waste ground on the other side of the site. Some electrical gear is still in place forming part of the site and still is use as part of the National Grid.

As you walk along the edge of the site it is clear where urban explorers have pulled at loose bits of fence to create ways onto the site. I did not access the site through any of these gaps. The former power station site is privately owned meaning going onto the land is trespassing and the site, having once housed a major industrial facility, is likely dangerous in places. However, it is striking how easy it is for urban explorers to access the site via the gaps in the fence.

Keep on walking along the former Willington Power Station site until you reach a footbridge across the Midland Mainline.

Clamber up the footbridge’s steps, there are great views off to the right towards the power station.

Walk along the footbridge and down the other side.

Then turn right and follow the footpath a short distance through some scrub land.

Soon you reach the towpath of the Trent and Mersey Canal. On reaching the canal turn left to walk along the towpath.

Carry on along the Trent and Mersey Canal towpath back towards the centre for Willington.

Keep on walking, passing underneath a railway bridge.

Soon you reach a cluster of canal boats along the waterway in the centre of Willington.

Here off on the left there is a footpath leading around the top of a car park, across a small scrap of park, back onto the road beside the station.

Once on the station road turn right and walk back towards the centre of the town where the station is.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

Willington has sporadic trains throughout the day, south towards Burton-on-Trent, Tamworth and Birmingham and north towards Derby and Nottingham. The frequency varies, so sometimes you might have to wait several hours for a train. Willington (at the time of writing in November 2023) was served by the hourly V3 bus between Burton-upon-Trent and Derby. Buses are hourly throughout the day to both destinations, though the Sunday service goes onto a two hourly pattern after 18:15.