We have the power

If you’re wondering what an architect can bring to a nuclear power station, take a look at the work of YRM, which in its third incarnation has – among much else – cornered the market in nuclear expertise
Words Hugh Pearman | Portrait James Bolton

YRM. remember them? Of course you do. Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall were pioneering British modernists who came together in the post-war years to form one of the great practices of the reconstruction. That first generation was succeeded by the regime of Brian Henderson and David Allford, who developed the practice’s understated brand of clean-cut Miesian design in everything from airports via hospitals to office blocks and – our concern here – power stations. They designed the last nuclear power station to be built in Britain, the good-looking Sizewell B in Suffolk with its white dome. Then things all went a bit mad at the time of the late 1980s ‘Lawson boom’ when too many practices were tempted by the lure of the stock market. YRM diversified into interiors, acquired engineering firm Anthony Hunt, got its stock-market flotation in 1988, expanded rapidly – and crashed with the economy.

Except that it didn’t crash, quite. It fought its way through the early 1990s recession like everyone else but found itself once more running out of financial steam by 1997. And so YRM was reinvented, thanks to a management buyout that took it private again. Another new generation took over, everything was trimmed right back to basics, and YRM re-emerged as a pure architecture practice again, at first with just three people. It had been the closest of close shaves. And so the third chapter of the YRM story has been a deliberately organic-growth, low-profile one.

The strategy has worked.  Today YRM has a healthy office of some 40 people, based in a high-roofed well-converted Victorian industrial building alongside London’s King’s Cross station. Why am I going to see them?  Because – although it’s only one sector of its work – YRM happens to have pretty much all the architectural expertise going in nuclear power stations.  The UK will be building new ones. Some of the first will be by French-owned energy generator EDF.  And it has called in YRM to help design the first two.

One of these, Hinkley Point C in Somerset is well advanced in planning and consultation terms, not least because planning permission for an earlier version here was granted in 1990, but never built. The second, which will become Sizewell C, will be larger but on a more confined site on the Suffolk coast. But both, subject to approval, will bear power stations of identical output. These two alone will be able to supply some 13% of the UK’s planned electricity supply. The government has confirmed six further sites around the UK, in each case with an existing nuclear plant. EDF is likely to build two of those. Wind, water, solar and conventional fossil-fuel burning stations will make up the remainder of the national generating set. 

I’m not going to rehearse here the arguments for or against nuclear power stations, beyond noting that since the fervent anti-nuclear protests of the 1980s the overall environmental picture has changed considerably and reduction of carbon emissions has become the priority, along with an increasing desire not to be over-dependent on gas supplies from overseas.

Nuclear power generation, for all its great expense and need for very long-term storage of nuclear waste, has the benefit of being carbon-free in use.  EDF has long experience of this in its native France and elsewhere. Of the type of third-generation EPR (European pressurised water reactor) it plans for Britain, two prototypes are being built – in Finland and at Flamanville in France. Both are reported as suffering from construction delays and budget overruns. Perhaps the UK will benefit from this learning curve: we shall see.

What, however, can architects bring to all this?  It quickly becomes apparent during my talk with YRM’s John Clemow, Iain Macdonald, James Thomas and Jason Geen, that it amounts to a lot. Yes, the design of the reactor shells and the dimensions of the turbine halls are a given. But these are not silently humming automated places administered by robots. They have a very large human population looking after them, plus a lot of other people being trained, and large visitor centres. This means several other buildings. For instance, each site will have a simulator – a ‘shadow’ of the real station, for training purposes. ‘It’s a campus environment, with an intake of about 400 students,’ notes Macdonald. At maximum – during regular maintenance work every two to three years – each nuclear site must be able to support 1,200-1,400 people.

‘Starting in the 1960s, we’ve had a long line of occasional projects in power,’ is how Clemow, who joined YRM in the Henderson/Allford era, puts it. ‘So nuclear is another occasional project for us at this point, and we hope to do a few more than the ones we’ve got on at the moment.’

Indeed, YRM is anything but over-specialised – a glance at its current portfolio yields offices, airport, health, education, leisure and residential projects, plus it has satellite offices in Vienna and Bucharest, and a link-up with an American practice on healthcare architecture.  One fascinating sideline in our discussion concerns the architecture of power consumption rather than generation. YRM has built, for instance, several ‘server farms’ in London’s Docklands, of which Telehouse West is the latest in the series. These buildings, stuffed with the electronic engines that power the Internet and other data communications, are hugely power-hungry and there are an awful lot of them. They barely existed 20 years ago. Our lives now depend on them. They must be fed. We need power.

The power stations at Hinkley and Sizewell, then, will play their part in providing it. YRM has masterplanned Hinkley and designed individual buildings as well as facade treatments for the turbine halls. The process will be similar at the larger Sizewell plant. The main admin and operations building at Hinkley, for instance, will sit between the two turbine halls and cover 60,000m2, with a construction cost of £50m-£60m. The training centre is separate, placed offsite near the public information centre. ‘How do you attract and retain highly qualified personnel, given that there is a finite number of them?’  asks Macdonald. Training, apparently, takes up to two years. People have to like their surroundings in these remote places.

There is also the matter of the surrounding environment, something that is particularly important at Sizewell, a landscape of Special Scientific Interest. That project is still under wraps, but in passing Macdonald intriguingly mentions ‘the largest rammed-earth building in the UK’ as part of their thinking. ‘It’s not all about concrete.’

As the Hinkley project director Jason Geen puts it: ‘This was EDF’s first British project. How do you address the sensitivities of British planning, landscape, workspace mentality, the issues of landscape, how buildings relate to each other?  It wasn’t just our legacy experience with Sizewell that got us across the line here, but our experience in other areas like universities.’

James Thomas, project director for the Sizewell site, points out that the existing Sizewell B power station with its Euclidian geometry and white dome ‘is not an apologetic building’ and that this, along with the work Geen’s team is doing at Hinkley, is influencing the design thinking. Not that C can repeat B, because the shape of the big lumps and how they will be maintained is different.

Architects need to re-involve themselves with large-scale infrastructure projects like these. This is a Brunel moment, when architecture and engineering can re-establish dialogue. Just consider one thing: a turbine hall at one of these stations is 140m long by 50m wide by 45m high – and there are two of them at each. That scale informs everything else.  YRM, with its illustrious pedigree, has landed itself one of its biggest challenges yet.