Eggborough Power Station: Four cooling towers demolished

Four of eight huge cooling towers have been demolished at a former coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire.

The 300ft (90m) high structures in Eggborough, near Selby, were brought down shortly after 08:00 BST as part of a plan to redevelop the site.

It stood for 50 years in an area where all four Yorkshire counties - North, South, East and West - meet.

The Yorkshire Day demolition was watched by spectators who were dotted in fields around the rural site.

Police had closed roads and 40 security guards patrolled a 350m exclusion zone while contractor DSM carried out the work during drizzly conditions.

Billy Young, a technical director at the company, thanked members of the community for their patience and said it had been "a successful demolition".

"We appreciate that a large number of Eggborough residents and businesses could have been disrupted by the work, but we have worked hard to communicate with them behind the scenes and by correspondence to minimise this in as much as practicably possible," he said.

All eight towers each contained around 11,000 tonnes of reinforced concrete

The 2,000-megawatt power station was decommissioned in 2018 because it was no longer financially viable.

It started generating electricity in 1967 and produced enough to power the equivalent of Leeds and Sheffield combined.

A year after its closure, the site was acquired by the St Francis Group, which is planning an industrial and distribution park on the site after the remaining structures are demolished, including a 200m (660ft) high chimney.