Cooling Towers at Grangemouth Refinery, Falkirk

Grangemouth Refinery ceased crude oil processing in April 2025. This ended over a century of oil refining in Scotland along with Scotland's energy self-sufficiency in oil refining and led to the direct loss of over 400 jobs.

The 9 cooling towers at Grangement still dominate the site – but for how much longer? “Higher than the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral (300ft+), yet with a concrete hyperbolic structure in some places only seven inches thick,” says the C20 Society, “cooling towers are unlike any other structure in the British landscape.” But many are now under threat. From a peak of 240 towers in the 1960s, the C20 Society believes that only 61 still remain.

Info about the C20 Society’s campaign to list the most important examples of these structures is at https://c20society.org.uk/cooling-towers