Why Tinsley Towers?

In the 1980s, hitch hiking was common practice, it was how everyone I knew travelled round the country. Strange that in these times of recession and eco sensibillity, no one does it anymore. I was 17 when I first really noticed Tinsley Towers I must have passed them on coach journeys to rugby league finals and in cars hitching to Stonehenge festival but they'd never slipped through the filters. Sometimes things are just too big and the mind acts like a sieve, letting through only detail. Vaster chunks of reality are rejected. Stonehenge was our mecca and  I missed so much heald back by magic invested in the wrong place.
Cooling towers had always been there on the horizon throughout my childhood journeys. Through drizzle on coach or locomotive windows like memories of dreams, distant, surreal to the max of ordinary. The purity of form and scale elevated  them through my childs eyes to a level where I didn't seperate them from cliffs or hills. Not additions to but part of the landscape.
My generation either stayed on at school or signed on at 16. Few wanted or got jobs. There was far too much to do. The journey I was taking was a 2 day hitch from Leeds to Cornwall. After leaving school the first year was a golden age of alternative culture I had already succumbed to of acid, constant cannabis, constant music. No one had died yet. Drugs werent just fun but sacramental, a doorway to God, the secrets of the universe, time, space were all ours.
It didn't last long before mental illness started to stalk our small tribe, it would be years before all the deaths but I felt a dark cloud spreading so packed a sleeping bag, half punce of weed and stuck out my thumb. My first lift took me just 30 miles and dropped me at the feet of Tinsley Towers. I learned how ants might feel. After all the hype, all the cosmic bullshit, even all the history, Stonehenge had been a disappointment architecturally. It was easy to imagine why and how it was built. Tinsley Towers, though, as I looked up seemed to touch the sky. The polar opposite of vertigo got me. How had man built these? Men had been up there!
Night fell and the M1 flyover before me and the 2 black gods behind pitched me in to darkness slashed open by occassional headlights. When a car finally stopped, I forgot my weed I had stashed a few feet away for fear of filth and ran to the car. I can no longer recall where I slept that night.
Years go by and you come to take things for granted. I have hardly lived up north since then but visitted regularly to see friends, family,. roots. Each homecoming, seeing the towers meant I was nearly there. The Gateway to the North is a phrase often uttered.
Architecture is never just the building. Picture the drawings, models. Static ideals of a world in constant motion. The truth is never like that, it is how it is fed to you; like walking up Wembley Way, the pace, the gradual delivery. Tinsley Towers were never the most beautiful cooling towers, the throat details ruptured the form. It was how you came upon them that heald their wonder. The view from the north was perhaps the best but from the south had a lot in common. Vehicles poured down steep hills, three lanes of traffic, the left lane dropping away to Meadowhall meant concentration of the traffic and the timing of manoever critical as the M1 tightened to two lanes. As a passenger this didn't matter but as a driver your eyes had to pay attention whilst the 2 concrete gods saw you bow your head. Yet you couldnt. You had to look up to their majesty. Most memories of the Towers is from 60 miles an hour.
Since 1975 they had stood idle. Campaigners failed to get the government, through the Big Art project sponsored by channel 4, to stop Eon from demolishing the towers. At 3am on a night in August 2008 the towers were demolished. Many came out to witness this event of huge cultural vandalism, footage of the event is abundant on the internet. At roughly the same time my closest friend in Leeds died along with those days of being able to turn up at friends houses at any time of day or night in any state of consciousness.
Driving round Leeds the other week, having spent an hour at Richards grave, sharing a can of Special Brew, I found it wasnt there anymore. That sense of home. So I drove back down south. The gaping space where the towers had stood had various diggers, dumpers and tippers erasing thier footprint.
Rebuilding the Towers will not bring my home back. Rebuilding Quarry Hill Flats didnt bring my Mother back.
These time tunnels I am creating, climbing Moortown Water Tower again, rebuilding the Flats, the Towers. These time tunnels are an attempt to understand myself. It only dawned on me recently exactly what I was doing. I knew it was about nostalgia, stretching back to the first brick table, grieving for a childhood cut short and adulthood forced on a boy, now a man, able to reconstruct icons to tunnel my way back to grieve for what I never, truly grieved for. The defining event of my life that I never worked through, an event that always lingers like those cooling towers on the horizon seen through diagonal wind driven drizzle on bus windows.