Ten surreal British buildings that must never be demolished

James Graham is right to mourn the loss of the cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in Nottinghamshire. Graham is one of our most gifted modern playwrights and his choice of words to describe the towers is telling. He calls them “echoing concrete cathedrals” that stand like “giant sentinels on the horizon… kissing the clouds”.

Lincoln Cathedral this is clearly not, but these spewing cooling towers with their anthropomorphic curves are nevertheless powerful symbols of the East Midlands and its once thriving coal industry that Graham has written about, as did those who came before him like DH Lawrence.

What is “ugly” to some is “history” to others. Britain’s industrial past could be celebrated the way Germany does – they have preserved, for example, the former Zollverein coal mining complex near Essen, and it’s now a popular tourist attraction and a World Heritage Site.

Obviously a Sunday stomp around a concrete car park is a harder sell to your aunt than high tea in a Cotswolds village, nonetheless a new generation is recognising the power of industrial and modernist architecture, their surreal forms, and the stories they tell about 20th-century Britain. If we demolish these buildings, that peculiar moment in time is gone forever. Here are 10 we should fight to save.

1. Moore Street Electricity Substation, Sheffield

Sheffield demolished its “Hole in The Road” roundabout featuring tanks filled with live fish and its Casbah-like Castle Market. The Tinsley Cooling Towers (which looked just like Ratcliffe’s) also went and artist Alex Chinneck said that particular loss was one inspiration behind his new “twisted narrowboat” sculpture which opened on the Sheffield & Tinsley Canal last month. But the 1968 Electricity Substation at Moore Street looks like it could survive the nuclear bomb dropped on Sheffield in the notorious film Threads. It resembles some kind of ambiguous alien base from another planet and makes unfamiliar drivers on the Ring Road crane their necks and exclaim: “What is that?!”

2. Forton Services, Lancashire

Looking very much like a Gerry Anderson creation from Thunderbirds, the Pennine Tower at Forton Services (now Lancaster Services) sits between Preston and Lancaster on the M6. It’s a familiar landmark to anyone who’s ever driven to Scotland or the Lake District. The Tower looks down at heel today but while we take motoring for granted now, it was – like motorways themselves – an exciting novelty when this service station was built in 1965. The Rank Organisation made films and ran cinemas and discos and when they took the left-field step of opening service stations like Forton they tried to inject glitz by calling it a Motorport and operating a glamorous (for its time) restaurant in the tower, where you could see as far as Morecambe and the Irish Sea.

3. Leeds University

Chamberlin, Powell & Bon were the suave architecture trio who built London’s Barbican and dreamt up a similarly large scheme to expand Leeds University to make it one of Britain’s biggest. Student folklore from my time studying there centred on the famous Red Route being “Britain’s longest corridor” and how sci-fi TV shows were shot there. The Walkways leading hungover students to the lecture theatres of the Roger Stevens Building are disorienting. But it’s still a spectacular sight along with the next-door Worsley Medical Building, which Damien Hirst made a film about for the BBC, explaining its influence on him. Leeds bulldozed its Yorkshire Post Building and International Pool recently, so we should be grateful to see these still standing.

4. Cumbernauld Town Centre, Dunbartonshire

Clad in a hard hat, Kevin McCloud winced as he surveyed the scruffy environs of Cumbernauld’s Town Centre in the 2005 TV programme Demolition. This is not something from Grand Designs. In fact, it has won more carbuncle competitions recently than Man City have won Premier League crowns. But hold on a second. This was the star of the hilarious 1981 Bill Forsyth comedy Gregory’s Girl, one of the best Scottish films ever made. And it was celebrated in Cumbernauld Hit, the 1977 Fenella Fielding-led James Bond spoof, one of the weirdest Scottish films ever made. It is a rare example of a built “megastructure”, which bearded architects were theorising about in the 1970s as a way to bring everything within one giant building.

5. Ringway Centre, Birmingham

The motel soap opera Crossroads was famous for its wobbly sets but the tough 1960s buildings of Birmingham are made of stronger stuff. The Ringway Centre is a condemned, curved office block which, for a while, also housed notorious nightclub Snobs, where Brummies went “on the pull”. Campaigners are still trying to save it from its fate, mindful that the monumental 1974 Central Library was recently demolished. They argue that demolition is incredibly environmentally wasteful. The 1962 Ringway Centre sits near the 1960s New Street Station Signal Box, which has been listed and looks like one of Grandma’s crinkle cut chips.

6. Arndale (now Kirkgate) Centre, Bradford

Bradford wants to demolish its award-winning shopping centre, which opened as an Arndale in 1976. Arndale built 23 centres, which transformed shopping in Britain – as authors John Grindrod and Otto Saumarez-Smith both discuss in their own brilliant books about British post-war buildings. But as Bradford is next year’s UK City of Culture, surely it should save this unique piece of heritage – it has, after all, rescued the old Yorkshire Building Society HQ up the road, which has been re-imagined as brutalist yuppie flats. You can find murals by the great William Mitchell on the side of the shopping centre (which I remember well as a kid growing up nearby).

7. UEA, Norwich

Designed by the masterful Denys Lasdun, the University of East Anglia campus is a world away from the cutesy medieval alleys of Norwich, yet it doesn’t look a million miles away from the heft of Norwich Castle. The ziggurats of student housing tumbling down to the River Yare mix modern architecture, a pastoral background and inevitable poor kitchen hygiene. Norwich is also struggling with Anglia Square and the former HMSO offices, a scrappy but intriguing mix of shops and a cinema which hosted the premiere of the Alan Partridge movie Alpha Papa in 2013, where Steve Coogan appeared on the red carpet in a powder blue safari suit.

8. Civic Centre, Portsmouth

Admittedly a far cry from Solent-set sailing soap Howards’ Way, the home of Portsmouth’s council still has a lot going for it. The Twentieth Century Society has recently failed to get the building listed, but they still believe its architecture has star quality and that it should not be demolished. The bronzed glass façade is eye-catching in a way that somehow mixes LA corporatism with East German socialist peoples’ palace flair. It sits across Guildhall Square from the Guggenheim-esque Portsmouth Central Library. It’s also near the former Tricorn centre, which writer Jonathan Meades loved and was demolished in 2004.

9. Robin Hood Gardens and Blackwall Ventilation Shafts, London

One of the arguments against demolition is that it takes ages. They’ve been trying to get rid of Robin Hood Gardens for a decade; one of the blocks still stands proud against the bulldozers. Architects Alison and Peter Smithson were quintessential Swinging Sixties characters and Alison appears in a space-y silver shirt discussing the flats in a Seventies BS Johnson film for the BBC. Later, the V&A took a piece of the demolished block to the Venice Biennale. Across the motorway you can see Sir Terry Farrell’s sixties ventilation shafts for the Blackwall Tunnel, which are also reminders of Ratcliffe’s cooling towers.

10. St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross, Scotland

One of Britain’s most famous ruins and one of the weirdest sights on a tour of Scotland you could imagine, this former Sixties college for Catholic priests has been abandoned since the Nineties – and the writer Gavin Stamp thinks it should remain a ruin. Several attempts to rescue it have been made, but it lives mainly as a spooky lightning rod for photographers and YouTubers seeking drama. Nestled in a forest next to a golf course not far from the Firth of Clyde, the strange fenced-off complex feels like something you’d stumble on after too many bottles of Buckfast and screenings of Trainspotting.