AUGUST 2024 · PATINA

Doorways to the Radiation Zone

Berkeley Nuclear Power Station · Severn Vale, Gloucestershire

Berkeley Nuclear Power Station was decommissioned in 1989 and is still there. That's the defining fact about the place — not that it's abandoned, but that it's suspended. The decommissioning process takes decades. The buildings stand, the perimeter is intact, and the radiation zone boundaries are marked in the specific way nuclear sites mark them: colour-coded, signposted, formal. Turquoise doors. Warning notices. The bureaucracy of controlled decay.

Turquoise weathered double doors on red brick building beside air conditioning unit — Turquoise doors — radiation zone boundary marker

— The lens

I'd been once before, the previous year, and met Alan in the car park. He comes every Saturday morning with a collection of teddy bears. He had a story about why. It was a good one.

This time I came back with a different lens — old Soviet glass, a Helios from Ukraine, the kind that renders edges soft and gives backgrounds a particular swirl. The choice felt appropriate for a facility built in the fifties and frozen somewhere in the early nineties: slightly wrong in register, warm in the wrong places, not quite aligned with the present.

The threshold between the nuclear zone and the Severn Vale housing estate is just a fence.
Berkeley Nuclear Power Station — August 2024

White painted door with dark patches on grey tiled wall surface — White door, grey tile — threshold detail

— Doorways

I was looking at doorways. The site is full of threshold spaces — archways through brick colonnades, white-painted doors on grey tiled walls, turquoise double doors beside an air conditioning unit, dark concrete entries with no visible interior. Each one a boundary. Some between buildings, some between safety classifications. The colour-coding tells you which side of the radiation zone you're standing on if you know how to read it.

Rusted metal staircase structure against red brick wall beside blue doorway — Staircase and blue door, brick colonnade

Dark doorway framed by concrete surround and red brick below — Dark entry — no visible interior

— The perimeter

Self-seeded vegetation was breaking through a facade on the multi-storey. A weathered utility shelter stood alone on overgrown grass. At the far edge of the site, wild seedheads in front of modern residential blocks — someone's kitchen window probably facing the cooling towers. People live alongside this place. The threshold between the nuclear zone and the Severn Vale housing estate is just a fence.