13538

 

II*  

Designated  

24/11/1993  

18/07/2000  

Cwm Coke Works Southern Cooling Tower  

 

Rhondda Cynon Taff  

Llantrisant  

Pontypridd  

Tynant  

306584  

186095  

 

One of a pair of wooden cooling towers located opposite the offices in the centre of Cwm Coke Works. Immediately to the S of and aligned with the larger northern tower.  

Industrial  

 

Cwm Coke Works was established in 1957 by the National Coal Board to produce coke from coal mined at Cwm Colliery. The coke was used in iron foundries, metal smelting furnaces, sugar beet refineries, brickworks, and heating boilers. Coke works were once commonplace, and were frequently attached to collieries or steelworks, but few are now operational in Britain. Cooling towers were often found at coke works as well as at power stations, chemical works, and other sites where water cooling was necessary, from the late nineteenth century. The earliest were made of timber, but these were gradually replaced with parabolic concrete structures from the 1920s. Very few wooden cooling towers now survive anywhere, although they were once common features of industrial areas throughout the world. The towers at Cwm Coke Works are unusual in having been built at so late a date, but they follow traditional construction methods going back to the end of the C19.  

The south tower is square in plan, approx 6 x 6m and tapers slightly to a flat open top about 15m high. The timber planks which make up the walls are placed vertically and supported on horizontal and diagonal members which are in turn fixed to an exterior frame of vertical posts, also of wood. The base consists of spaced slats to permit ventilation into the tower which causes the steam to condense.  

 

Listed II* as one of an exceptionally rare pair of surviving towers illustrating this important historic technology.