Shropshire Star comment: Powerful changes possible

It is large and with great potential – also great challenges. It could become a showpiece of early 21st century imagination, inspiration and, not least, taste; another jewel for the Ironbridge Gorge.

In its way, it is also part of the history and the heritage of the Gorge. The original power station, a much smaller affair, went up in the 1930s and brought electricity to parts of Shropshire. It was demolished in the 1980s.

Its brash and modern successor, with which it operated in tandem for some years, is of a different scale entirely. There was no hiding it and its huge chimney and cooling towers. They did what they could and locals got used to it as just something else on the landscape.

Then there were the jobs it provided and those other incidental things, like the railway which remained open to take it coal – it was coal-fired for most of its life – and the social club and sports pitches in its shadow.

Back in the 1960s, when it was conceived, who could have imagined that it would be missed? It is missed now as a living plant and with the complex being sold it cannot be that long before Shropshire will start to see one of the most radical landscape changes since... well, since it was built in the first place.

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There is going to be one mighty gap to be filled. With its established industrial use it is a brownfield site, so there is scope there for some industry or business use, and with the current cries for new housing, it will surely be looked at with a view to creating homes, perhaps in the context of a modern village. That will create considerations of access and traffic management.

The setting is magnificent and there have been calls for some sort of country park or nature area.

With such a big site, all of these things are possible at the same time.

Then there is that other question; not of what should go up in place of the power station, but what, if anything, of the power station should be kept.

The Ironbridge Gorge is a World Heritage Site and although the power station does not stretch back centuries, it too has a past and maybe something could be included in the redevelopment which is a nod to that past.

So much to think about.