You might be forgiven for thinking I have come over all feverish. After all, what am I on about? Isn't this just a power station, a regrettable but necessary blot on the landscape? Who cares? Well, I do and you ought to. Stop and think for a second: this place - this single huge and, yes, beautiful place - generates seven per cent of all the power used in the UK. Like the remnants of the coal industry, it is privately owned and managed these days, and has a well-documented debt burden, but it is strategically oh-so-important. If Drax stopped working, trouble would loom. Our power reserves would become dangerously stretched. All it would take would be a couple of unforeseen shut-downs somewhere else, a few overcooked boilers here and there taken out for repair combined with a sudden safety-scare shutdown at a nuclear plant, say. Or a ruptured gas pipeline, or even a dead calm stifling all the wind generators. If Drax was not there with its reassuring mountains of stored pulversised coal, able to swing into action with well-practised ease, then we know what would happen. We have seen the warnings in the United States. Our lights would start to go out, our computers would cough and die. Planes would be unable to take off or land, cities would seize up. We would be left sitting in the lonely darkness.
I might have the image of the ancient monument in my head but, when I arrive, Drax and its hinterland are thankfully working as they should. The motorways are running just fine. When I see the cranes and watertowers of the inland port of Goole to the right, as the M18 nears its T-junction with the M62, there as ever is Drax, right on axis, dead ahead, as if placed on some ancient ley line. It's end-on from this approach, so you don't get the full impact of its bulk until you leave the motorway and double back - along a militarily straight road obviously built for the purpose - and approach the place direct. It just keeps getting larger, and larger, and larger. Until you are standing right in front of it, security pass in hand, craning your neck upwards, struggling to take it all in.
And then noticing some of the details. Like the way the louvred, metal-panelled sides of the boiler and turbine halls are echoed in the sawtooth flanks of the rather good Brutalist concrete-and-glass administration block with its surprisingly sumptuous boardroom. Or the quality of the surrounding landscape, neglected perhaps but still impressive. This place was not just flung together. Someone thought about it, and cared. The people now running Drax don't have a clue who it was, so I search the records and find them. An architect called Jeff King from a practice called Clifford Tee and Gale. A landscape architect called Arnold E.Weddle. Engineers leading the whole thing, of course: W.S. Atkins and Partners. These were never superstars. They just quietly got on with the job. And they were well up for it.
The architects still exist, and dig their original design report of 1965 out of their vaults for me. This is a historic document and it makes fascinating reading. We have been brainwashed with the notion that the 1960s were a time of maximum environmental insensitivity, that nobody gave a stuff about what was built where or what it looked like, but this is nonsense. When they designed Drax, they were much concerned with aesthetics. They knew their responsibilities.
"The complex will be visible over a vast area…owing to the open nature of the site the masses will always be seen against the sky…it follows that the setting and treatment of the buildings and structures are of utmost importance," the report states on the first page. Drax was all very carefully considered: the grouping of the cooling towers, the massing of the buildings, the choice of colours and textures, the hierarchy of chimneys, the strategic planting of clumps of trees in the vicinity to avoid the place dominating nearby villages. Where possible, existing trees on the site were saved and moved.
But what they did not do was try to make it invisible. Not for them the cop-out solution of the dematerializing silver-grey big shed that we see today at distribution nodes all round the country. Oh no: they were proud of it. It had to be seen. "The first aim should be to design a group of structures, clearly visible and acceptable in the landscape," wrote those 1960s architects. And there follows page after page of pencil sketches showing how they think it will look from miles around. These sketches, though perhaps deliberately a little faint, were honest and true: that is exactly how it turned out. Go to Drax today, and it looks just like they drew it. So the composition of Drax was no happy accident. Like Stonehenge, it was designed and laid out with precision to be an awe-inspiring as well as a functional object.
The day I visit, Drax is humming away purposefully. Water cascades around the open bases of the 12 cooling towers, each 374 feet high, the future sarsens of my imagination. The central obelisk - the 850-foot chimney - has a shimmer of smudgy heat above it. Down below near the entrance, wires hum and crackle as four million kilowatts of raw power emerge, to be stepped up to 400,000 volts for the National Grid. Inside, tiny people, like Roald Dahl's oompah-loompahs, are occasionally to be seen far away scurrying about their business in the prodigious turbine hall, the even bigger but much more densely-packed boiler hall, or out the back dealing with constantly-arriving, slowly-moving trainloads of coal and crushed limestone.
