Manweb Substation
A rural relic of a bygone public institution lies along a quiet country road in North Cheshire. Manweb was originally created in 1947 as the nationalised ‘Merseyside And North Wales Electricity Board’ aka M.A.N.W.E.B under the Electricity Act 1947. It was privatised in 1990, when it became MANWEB plc and was responsible for the purchase of electricity from the Central Electricity Generating Board and the distribution and sale of power to customers. By the looks of the deterioration of this substation, it was probably switched off and removed from service when the company was privatised.
Nature has had a wonderful effect on the site over the decades. The green theme of the facias and door panels somehow compliments the ferns and ivy perfectly. There aren't many sites across the UK that truly show what the country would look like in an apocalyptic world. They usually somehow are interfered with to some extent. Either vandalism, squatting, theft, or these days the internet. With it's tendency to destroy the natural state of places by luring careless individuals into these places. A substation on the other hand? well, who cares about that. You can't exactly claim a substation is haunted, or the electricity was used to torture someone in some form of rural tesla-experiment gone wrong, causing thousands of houses to mysteriously plunge into darkness. No, it's just a substation, with some lovely retro gear and fantastic reminders of what high quality British engineering used to keep our nationalised infrastructure running.