Station B, Darlington’s electricity power station that dominated the townscape with three huge, squat cooling towers and three tall, slender chimneys, stopped generating.
At least one man was killed during the construction of the brick cooling towers, which replaced Station A, in early 1940. When B began generating in May 1940, Lord Haw-Haw announced that Darlington was now a target for German bombers. Perhaps as a response, some people remember the cooling towers, off Haughton Road, being painted with camouflage.
The station was nationalised in 1948, and in 1950 the British Electricity Authority promised the people of the Bank Top area of town that it would do something about the station’s ‘artificial drizzle’. Steam from the towers mixed with vapours from the slender chimneys, which then mingled with smoke from the trains on the mainline to produce a continuous fine shower, rendering it impossible for housewives to hang white clothes in their backyards.
The problem was not resolved until 1976 when the station was shut, having only contributed to the National Grid at peak times for three years. The demolition of the towers on 28 January 1979, solved another problem: people all over town reported that their colour television reception improved enormously. The three chimneys were demolished one by one in 1982.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2009)