Megawatt Valley: Echo’s of Power
Megawatt Valley is a photographic project examining the lasting impact of large-scale coal-fired power generation on the landscape of the River Trent. Once responsible for producing a significant proportion of the UK’s electricity, this region was shaped by an interconnected system of power stations, water management infrastructure, and engineered landforms. Many of these sites are now decommissioned, demolished, or partially reclaimed.
Using large-format photography, the project focuses not on the spectacle of industry, but on its residual presence: water intake and outlet points, altered riverbanks, boundaries, access routes, and remaining structures. In places where power stations no longer exist, the work records absence — fields, woodland, and waterways that still bear the imprint of former industrial use.
Rather than presenting a comprehensive survey, the series traces recurring visual and conceptual themes across multiple sites, allowing repetition and variation to reveal how industrial power continues to structure the landscape long after its function has ended. The River Trent acts as both a physical and symbolic thread, linking sites through shared systems of flow, control, and memory.
Megawatt Valley is concerned with how energy infrastructure reorganised land and water, and how those changes persist in quiet, often overlooked ways. The work positions the landscape not as restored or ruined, but as negotiated — shaped by cycles of use, abandonment, and adaptation.