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Staythorpe Power Station

National Power (now RWE Npower) successfully sought permission to build a new gas-fired power station on a site beside the River Trent which had earlier been occupied by two coal fired stations.

For the most part the old stations had nominally been screened by single row boundary planting of fast growing, now declining, poplar and willow trees; there existed extensive railway sidings and other land which had become covered by deep layers of ash.

In 1995 the last coal fired station was demolished and a new road built to enable construction traffic for the new station to bypass Averham Village.

The Consultancy was brought into the road design team to provide landscape advice.  As a consequence of the successful work carried out, the commission to design the details of the extensive on and off site planting, intended to assimilate the power station into the surrounding countryside, followed.  Between 1996 and 2001, when the last capital works programme was completed, over a third of a million trees and shrubs were planted, mostly on site, but some off-site to screen locally unwanted views of the new station from the popular Trentside villages to the south east. 

Since 2002 the maintenance of the plantings has been successfully executed to the annual specifications and contracts prepared and supervised by the Consultancy.

The new gas-fired station came into operation during the winter of 2010.  A semi-mature landscape now exists within which trees in the screening plantations are 12 meters high.  The earlier ash surfaces, now being modified by decayed leaf litter, are beginning to support vegetation and wildlife within the station is flourishing.