Beautiful to some, a blot on the countryside to others, Didcot Power Station's monumental cooling towers have dominated the landscape of rural Oxfordshire for decades. But they will produce clouds of dust rather than steam when they are demolished on Sunday.

The power station's gigantic, concrete towers in the heart of Midsomer Murders country have stood in stark contrast to their surroundings for more than 50 years.

Public opinion is divided over the structure's good, bad, and ugly aspects. Some point to the jobs and communities it has created, while others highlight its 655ft (199.5m) smoke-belching chimney - one of tallest structures in the UK - and say it is part of dirty industry they want to abolish forever. //

Lyn Bowen switched the power station on in 1970 and turned it off in 2013

Lyn Bowen, who moved to the area to run the plant, said the "only thing missing" when he first visited Didcot was "tumbleweed".

The 79-year-old remembers the excitement he felt, flicking the switch in the control room as the power station was turned on.

"All the pieces had been put together and it works," he recalled.

From that day, its boilers consumed 185 tonnes of coal every hour, which was burned to raise the temperature of the steam so high - 568C - so that it powered four mighty turbines.

The turbines then spun a generator rapidly to produce 2,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity to power millions of homes. The steam, still roaring hot, was condensed and allowed to escape through the six giant cooling towers. //

The government plans to phase out the UK's last coal-fired plants by 2025 to reduce carbon emissions.

Dame Marina believes the architects of such stations should not be "vilified", but have their designs recognised as "achievements and a sort of human excessive, triumphalism over nature, which we must say goodbye to".

"The work these buildings were doing was for everybody," she says. "This was the engine of society - this kind of fuel consuming and fuel making machine."

Between 06:00 and 08:00 BST hundreds will watch on as the three northern cooling towers are blown down, leaving the giant chimney to stand alone until the autumn.

The Oxfordshire skyline will never look the same again.