Blow Down Archives - North West End UK

10Feb

By Paul ClarkeNo Comments

Yorkshire & Humber

Blow Down – Leeds Playhouse

It's certainly a first time experience watching a play billed as being about the demolition of massive cooling towers at a Yorkshire Power Station. Garry Lyons, who lived near the massive cooling towers at Ferrybridge Power Station that dominated the landscape around the M62 for 50 years, recorded over 25 hours of interviews with people who worked there - or made a life in their giant shadows. The result is a moving, and often very funny, verbatim play musing on what really happens when a community loses its industrial heartbeat. Act one focuses on the power station's heyday as Matthew Booth's almost stereotypical bluff Yorkshireman recalls the dangers and vast financial rewards of working in a close knit team at the plant. It is a dry and often poignant testimony of what happe...

Garry Lyons talks about the unlikely inspiration for his new play, Blow Down, that comes to Leeds Playhouse

Giant concrete cooling towers just outside Leeds might seem an unlikely source for a play, but local playwright Garry Lyons decided he needed to tell the stories of those who lived and worked in their massive shadows. When the Ferrybridge Power Station towers were blown up after they were decommissioned thousands made the trip to see them come down. Lyons is an award-winning writer who has used extensive interviews with workers and locals to create a show about change, but also full of laughs examining what these concrete landmarks that could be seen for miles meant for his community. In what ways were the towers architecturally significant? The eight cooling towers were huge, nearly 400 feet high, with two 650ft chimney stacks alongside. When you came across them at night, ...

Blow Down tells the story of two iconic Yorkshire landmarks

The demolition of the iconic cooling towers at Ferrybridge Power Station that impacted on the lives of the people who lived and worked beneath them is probably not an obvious choice for a play. When the towers were explosively demolished thousands turned up to watch them come down and Blow Down about their history is scripted by award-winning playwright Garry Lyons who lived near them based on stories collected from the local community in Ferrybridge and Knottingley. He’s written a funny, gritty and thought-provoking show with music about how losing a major landmark and employer impacts on a typical post-industrial Yorkshire town. From the towers’ raucous seventies heyday through recession and decline in the 2000s, Blow Down tells the story of the area through the experiences of peop...