In today’s Urbandoned video, we are sharing our 2019 exploration of the notorious Eggborough
Power Station in Yorkshire that ceased operating a year before our visit.
The immense structure required a lot of care to infiltrate with patrolling security and
many cameras, but on a cold and rainy night, we were able to make it inside and explore
the site in its entirety.
Containing everything that you would want in an industrial site, all we could do was
marvel at the towering premises, sat in eerie silence.
Join us as we see what remains within the power station.
This footage was captured a few hours before our exploration began on a stormy night.
As our entrance was difficult and lengthy, we weren’t focusing on filming anything
during it, so you next meet us inside the facility after sunrise.
Alistair: Holy sh**!
Alistair: This place is obviously completely amazing, but at the moment, we’re struggling
to enjoy it as what we usually would, just because of the weather and how cold we are.
I don’t know if you can hear my voice, but I’m literally shaking.
My voice and all.
It’s horrible, but yeah, this place is pretty unbelievable, to be honest.
It’s massive.
If you couldn’t tell already, the footage we exited the power station with wouldn’t
be up to our standards nowadays.
It definitely didn’t help with our ice cold, shaky hands and lack of sleep after a night
dedicated to making it inside, but we do apologise that we could never capture the building as
we would now.
Hopefully, you can look past this and appreciate that we felt it deserved to be shared, even
with poor documentation.
Alistair: ‘154ft.’ Jesus...
We started trekking upwards in the boiler house, a tremendous region of the structure
standing at almost 300ft.
Here, we would come across a mesh of coal-covered machines and creaky walkways.
Alistair: The pipes in this place are ridiculous.
They go all throughout the facility and they’re everywhere.
All the walkways are obviously made so they go under and over all the pipes and other
bits of machinery.
This place is completely full of tubes that all connect together, I guess.
Alistair: Holy sh**!
Oh my god…
Alistair: So, we’ve just seen this site has many cooling towers and heading over to
these windows, I suspect that we’ll get a sighting of the chimney.
It looks like we are.
Oh my god!
It is absolutely massive.
Alistair: We’ve finally made it all the way to the top of this building.
Some of the boys are already here.
Up on the roof at the peak of the generating station besides the chimney, we could finally
see the true scale of the goliath.
It boasted eight cooling towers that dominated the Yorkshire skyline for miles around.
Eggborough first produced power in 1967 alongside the nearby Ferrybridge Power Station which
opened a few years earlier.
Despite eventually having four units, it only started with one and was officially opened
when the fourth unit had been commissioned in 1970.
It became a recognisable staple for locals in Knottingley where it resided, and for anyone
else that would pass by, it’s massive complex visible clearly on the relatively flat landscape.
By 2007, 300 people were employed at the station with a generating capacity of 1960 megawatts.
It’s closure came shortly after, originally planned in 2015, but delayed for a couple
of years until a new gas-fired power station was announced next door to replace it.
On the 2nd February 2018, it was announced that Eggborough would close by the coming
September, but it was decomissioned only a month later on March 23rd at 2am.
Reece: I can’t complain, though.
Alistair: To put into perspective how dirty we got getting in here,
Reece’s shoes were blue.
Reece: They were blue.
That is very true.
Alistair: Mine were reddy-brown and what colour were yours?
Oli: I’m so cold!
Alistair: He can’t even answer.
Although that clip on the roof showed how freezing, wet and dirty we were, the temperature
was warming up steadily.
Afterwards, we advanced to the area where the facility’s conveyor belts meet the boiler
house.
Alistair: This is quite a cool design for a conveyor belt that I’ve never seen before.
Obviously, you’ve got this conveyor on the top floor and then below, you’ve got more
conveyors on the second floor and possibly more on the floor beneath, it looks like,
although, I can’t be sure.
They all meet up at the end, as well, which is pretty cool.
We had been putting it off with doubts that we might not be completely alone in the huge
building, but as we grew in confidence, we decided to head towards the turbine hall,
aiming for its overhead gantry cranes initially, to gauge whether there was anyone below us.
Alistair: This crane is absolutely epic!
I’m hoping that it shows up how big it is on camera, but it’s huge.
It would go all the way along the turbine hall to repair the turbines.
You can see the two claws, there, one slightly bigger than the other to lift different weights.
That is unbelievable!
I never thought I’d see a place like this, to be honest.
Looking down at the turbines from the bulky cranes and their cabins, we were amazed by
their size and design.
Without witnessing a security guard or worker on the ground, it was only a matter of time
before we found ourselves on their level.
Alistair: We’re on the ground level with the turbines now and it is pretty something.
It actually just takes your breath away to be honest.
The scale of this one room and the amount of effect it had on everyone that lived around it.
It was an incredible sight to behold.
These four 500 MW blue turbines were the base of the entire structure, built to accommodate
them and produce a total electrical output just below 2000, enough electricity to power
2 million homes.
Alistair: This is my most favourite turbine yet, because all of it’s sides are exposed
completely and you can see how much piping and other stuff goes into getting it to work.
It’s literally insane…
There is so many little bits of machinery that you never see a lot of the time, but
it’s all on show, here.
This place is like a museum, really.
Working our way around the dusty turbine hall, we were able to get close and personal to
the fascinating machines that would take in steam created in the boiler house and cause
the generator to spin to produce electricity.
The steam would be cooled, condensed back into water and returned to the boiler through
the maze of pipes below the turbines to repeat the process over and over.
Alistair: Look at all those storage boxes.
I wonder what’s in them.
They don’t look too old, to be fair.
Must be some ongoing work, I guess.
The only region we desperately wanted to see now was the brains behind the entire operation,
the control room.
Boarded at its main entrance, it was clear we would have to find a different way to reach
it.
Whilst searching, we would come into contact with an array of offices, labs and staff rooms
full of belongings.
Nothing was reinstated elsewhere when the property closed down, with some fairly expensive
kit left neglected.
Inevitably, after traversing through a switchroom, we would reach the staircase that we were
certain would lead us to our prize.
Alistair: Holy sh**! Holy sh**! Holy sh**… what?!
Our jaws dropped!
In front us lied a spaceship-like room untouched with blue panels that screamed 60s, the central
control room of Eggborough Power Station.
After the work put in to reach this very room, we could finally breathe a sigh of relief
and take it all in, knowing that the mission was definitely worth it.
Each corner of the room held an area for the four units bending around the square layout,
as well as engineering and station services.
The other control desks for said facilities occupied the trio of long panels in the middle.
It wasn’t hard to feel the importance of the control room whilst inside it’s walls.
Over the decades, many have sat at the various desks and watched as technology changed rapidly,
yet the overall task for the plant remained the same.
It’s architecture has hardly changed however, surprising because most power stations would
simplify their panels and leave them requiring one or two people.
We could have kept wandering around the room, gawking at the amazing panels, yet tired,
drained and hungry, we figured it was time to leave.
Exploring Eggborough had been a special experience.
It was the first time we had managed to infiltrate a more modern power station and it was a treat
to see one complete with an intact boiler house, turbine hall, control room, cooling
towers and chimney with no signs of demolition.
The scale of the property was mind-blowing, particularly noticeable in the turbine hall.
It had felt weird to have such a vast site totally to ourselves for the six hours we
were inside.
On our way out, we turned to see the place we had just visited and traipsed away in awe.
Unfortunately for Eggborough, it’s lack of demolition didn’t last long.
Works began in 2020 with the cooling towers coming down first and have progressed all
the way until now, as the chimney and boiler house has crumbled to the ground.
Little remains now, and the seemingly permanent image of the power station on the Yorkshire
horizon has been erased forever.
Here are some of our photographs captured at the abandoned power station.
If you like the look of them, check out our Instagram page in the description, where we
share images of our explores months before they are seen on YouTube.
Thanks for watching!
Remember to tune in to the live streams we will be doing the day after every episode
in the evening, where we can discuss our explorations in more detail and answer any questions.
See you next time!