Abstract

This paper will examine the aesthetics of West Burton power station, which was built on the Nottinghamshire side of the River Trent, near to the market town of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, between 1961 and 1969. It will firstly consider the manner of its design as an attempt to ‘naturalise’ this modern, but otherwise quite alien, development within the flat, grass and wetland habitat of the Trent Valley. Secondly, the paper will go on to argue that both the design of West Burton, and the way it was represented in journals like The Architectural Review was defined by a working awareness of the traditions and principles of eighteenth-century Picturesque theory, and of the modernist revival of those ideas with regard to design and planning in the postwar years.