On the eastern edge of the beach stands B. It’s hard to get the scale of it from a distance, or even close-to; you have to be inside to realise how vast its interior spaces are. They contain steam compressors, the nuclear technology of the immediate post-war period. The architect, Simon Conder, visited it recently. There are still thousands of people in there, he told me, mostly drinking tea it seems, but in fact engaged in closing down the station. He asked one of them how long the closing-down would take, and the answer was a hundred years.
Click Here To View The Full ArticleDungeness is a shingle foreland on the southernmost tip of Kent. It’s now a National Nature Reserve. The feeling is stark – emptiness and bleakness; certainly oddness – but also beautiful if you’ve got the taste for it. There’s the kale, the shingle and the sea, and then all the myriad structures standing up from the vast flatness. Beautiful old boats, caravans, the lifeboat station, smoke ovens, cars (plus miscellaneous remains of the foregoing), two beautiful light houses (each a different design), the old coastguard tower, the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway, and sometimes a ship the height of a skyscraper going by out on the horizon. And of course the spooky, enormous nuclear plants, A and B, which were constructed between the mid-Sixties and mid-Eighties, from plans drawn up after the Second World War.
