Star date: 27th September 2015

AGECROFT POWER STATION BUILDING 1925 – 2015

This week, ex-workers from Agecroft Power Station met up for a tour of the remaining building on Agecroft Road on its 90th anniversary. Now the HQ of Salford hi-tech company, IT Lab, staff dressed in 1920s clothes for the open day, which included displays of old photos, books and films featuring `Salford's second cathedral'...

Full details and loads of photos here...

For years Agecroft Power Station - and Agecroft Colliery opposite - totally dominated the skyline of Pendlebury and Kersal, before its demolition in 1993. While stations B and C were totally bulldozed, station A survived, and this week hosted a 1920s-themed open day to mark its 90th anniversary.

Now the HQ of hi-tech company IT Lab, staff dressed in period costume and met with around twenty former workers from Agecroft, accompanying them on a tour of the site which included  the 1925 turbine house, battery room and switch house.

One of the guests was Peter Hooton, who began as an apprentice fitter at Agecroft in 1950 and stayed until his retirement as maintenance service manager in 1991. Peter still has an amazing golden key which used to open all the gates to the stations, has written a book on the power station and remembered his first impressions on being shown around the complex...

"I was completely shocked" he recalled "because when you walked along, your feet were crunching all the time. It was the grit coming out of the chimneys and it was all over the place. I was taken to the boiler house and it was filthy, with ash and water all over the place from steam leaks. The reason was that during the war they had to keep the stations going but there was a lack of materials and insulation on pipe work was left off. I learned a lot here about life as much as anything else. It was an amazing learning curve."

Eventually Agecroft Power Station became state of the art with its stunning deco-green control room becoming the central attraction for school visits and open days. Meanwhile, those four huge cooling towers were almost Salford's second cathedral.

They were demolished in 1993, with the colliery having shut two years earlier, but Peter missed the spectacle...

"I was on my way back from holiday and when I came back they were gone" he explained "I wasn't upset but thought that the station hadn't got to the end of its life. In 1985 we were told the station would run until 2005 and they spent a lot of money getting it ready - but it was privatised, they didn't want to put any money into the place and were more concerned with getting rid of stuff. They said the colliery was uneconomical to mine too but I'm not sure."

This week, however, it was a celebration of Agecroft Power Station's glory days when it boasted the highest chimney in Europe (365 feet, later increased to 450 feet, and contained 1.75 million Accrington bricks weighing in between 5,000 and 6,000 tons), employed over four hundred people and supplied thousands of homes and businesses with electricity.

"I think we've always appreciated how amazing this place is but over the last six to eight months we've been researching it and everyone was fascinated to learn stuff about the building that we're all so intimate with" said Andrew Burgess director of IT Lab, which looks after IT for medium and small businesses and employs over one hundred people on the current site. 

"In 1925 when this first opened it was leading edge technology" he explains "It was hi-tech then and it's hi-tech today, which over a ninety year history of a building is quite unusual. The thing that always catches us by surprise is that ninety years ago there was a power station in the middle of Salford - in fact three A, B and C - and that gets a little bit of getting used to because that would never be allowed to happen these days. They stick them in the middle of nowhere and keep them well away from people. I'm just really pleased that the people who have come along have treated it as a bit of a reunion, people from the coal mining community and those who used to work here."

The open day was also attended by Salford City Mayor and the Irwell Valley Mining Project, which displayed paraphernalia from Agecroft Colliery to complement the books, films and photos featuring Agecroft Power Station at its pomp.

For one day, Salford's second cathedral came back to life...

For loads more photos, info and films visit the IT Lab website – click here

Main photo shows ex-Agecroft workers outside the main entrance to IT Lab