It’s not in London, not at a convenient hour, and the organisers would rather no one turned up – so here are the details.
Not far from Oxford is the small town of Didcot, and the very large power station that was Didcot A which used to be a combined oil and coal based system, but is now closed and being demolished. Controversially, the main boiler house collapsed in 2016 during its demolition and killed four men.
However, the cooling towers remain — and will soon also be taken down, in an early morning explosion.
The demolition firm Brown and Mason and site owners RWE NPower recently announced plans to collapse the towers at Didcot A, along with a 200-metre high chimney. Although the date was announced, the time was not.
The blast is now expected to take place sometime between 6am and 8am on Sunday, 18th August — which has been confirmed by an air traffic warning not to fly close to the site between those hours.
The three dramatic landmarks of the cooling towers — which despite their use in photos of the evils of fossil fuels, actually pump out steam — will be the ones to be demolished in the morning. The tall flue tower — the one that actually pumps out fossil fuel gases will come down in the autumn.
However, no official plans are being made for people to watch the demolition, so it’s very much an event you can watch, from a distance, if you can find somewhere suitable.
Some of the more likely locations, based on where people gathered for the 2014 demolition would include Wittenham Clumps (which has exceptionally good views) and a park in the Ladygrove Estate, and recently built, it seems a location in a new Great Western Park housing estate might be rather good.
The roads around the area wont be closed, although some local footpaths will be for public safety, so if you were to make a trip out, stick to safe vantage points.
On the day, an exclusion zone of 300 to 400 metres will be set up around the cooling towers – and 500 to 600 metres around the chimney – with security guards employed to ensure it is not breached.
If you are in Didcot for the event, then of course, you might as well pay a visit to the Didcot Railway Centre, or the Pendon Museum.
The cooling towers actually release semi condensed water, not steam.