Ratcliffe Power Station towers will be blown up - but a new monument needs to take their place

A petition has been created calling for the cooling towers at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station to be saved after the site's closure

It was a privilege to attend the event officially marking the closure of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station this week. The poignant day was full of appreciation for the thousands of workers who have passed through the station gates during the last 60 years, powering Nottinghamshire and the country as a whole.

Yet one thing unsettled me and it relates to the aspect of the power station that has been on everyone's mind amid this week's closure - its eight colossal cooling towers. As the last coal-fired power station to close in the UK, Ratcliffe's cooling towers are an important monument to the coal industry as a whole.

With a huge redevelopment planned at the Ratcliffe site though, these industrial giants are set to be blown up. The whole decommissioning process is set to take around two years, so these Nottinghamshire landmarks could be gone sooner than you think.

A petition has already been started calling for the towers to be saved. Admittedly, saving all eight of the towers would be letting romanticism get in the way of a redevelopment that is set to create between 7,000 and 8,000 jobs.

If those numbers are believed, that would mean more than double the number of jobs at the site than the power station employed at its peak. Creating new industrial jobs on such a scale in Nottinghamshire is undoubtedly a more important legacy to leave behind than towering blocks of concrete.

Yet as we hurtle towards the future, we should not completely forget the past. Can at least one tower be saved?

Playwright James Graham, behind the BBC's Sherwood drama series, is one of those calling for the towers to be saved. Mr Graham wrote: "If these were in London, they would be saved... But we don't get to keep and celebrate these parts of our history and identity, ever. Why?"

Bosses at Uniper, the company that runs the site, have been clear though that none of the cooling towers will be saved. Mike Lockett, the UK Country Chair at Uniper, said: "The plan for the site includes a full redevelopment, including the site where the towers are, so that overall redevelopment will lead to the towers coming down."

Fair enough. As mentioned before, creating thousands of new jobs is more important than saving the relics of a dying industry.

What was unsettling though was the apparent lack of thought that has been paid thus far to having some sort of monument to the coal industry at Ratcliffe.

When asked if something would be possible, Mr Lockett told me: "I think there's a whole range of options we can explore as we go through the demolition process. We're very keen to make sure that we properly respect and mark the history of what's happened here on this site and we'll of course take that into consideration for our redevelopment."

It's reassuring to know that Uniper is "keen" on ensuring the history is recognised in some way, but with all the planning that has gone into the redevelopment so far, one would have thought there would be a bit more of an idea at this stage about how that recognition will look. To assuage the concerns of those who want to keep up the cooling towers, we need more detail about what will take their place as a monument to Nottinghamshire's mining past.