A new career in a new town

OK, so that is a slightly misleading title but I am not going to miss the opportunity to use a Bowie track when I am given the chance (it's from Low).

After eighteen months or so working on a project based in Cardiff I am now working back in Central London (Victoria) and at a coal-fired power station in the Midlands.

The cooling towers are familiar to me from the train journeys north and, more recently, from Didcott which I passed through on the way to and from Cardiff but I had never been this close to one before.

Actually I had to get pretty close to one to even know that it was there as the Midlands were cloaked in fog on my first visit there. The sun did its best all day and still it failed to shift it.

A power station means pylons and the area id thick with them. I trust that all the scare stories about high voltage cables are untrue as they pass directly over the office I work in. While the fog served only to hide the cooling towers (there are several) it had a more impressive impact on the pylons giving them a well-deserved sense of grandeur.

On the second day the fog did lift a little before darkness fell and I could see enough of the towers to see the smoke coming out of them, grey smoke disappearing in to a grey sky.

I like industrial architecture and I find working in a power station interesting. I'm hoping that the weather is better next time I go and I can see more of the industry, more of things like the pools of water that the towers sit in.

Despite being in the middle of nowhere (for a good reason) getting to the station is not that difficult, in fact it is much the same as going to Cardiff, even the rail fare is more or less the same.

It is too early to say how the project itself is going to go but I like being back in London for part of the time and am quite happy to go to the station for a couple of days every week or so. It looks like I made the right move.