Magnox

Planning
One of Spring’s very earliest commissions was the production and launch of a book commemorating 40 years of safe electrical generation at Sizewell A, dedicated to all the people who had worked on or for the plant throughout that time.

We began with an intensive community exercise, hosting tea parties, gatherings and a campaign of phone calls to discover people’s personal stories of Sizewell A’s history. The fascination with national history in parallel with the plant’s own story became apparent early on and led our approach to paginating the book.

Spring’s team became embedded with Magnox early on, with all of us on the project going through site induction and attending a wide range of committees, management team and marketing meetings.

Hand in hand with this, we were also working to arrange the celebration party, to which there were 1,500 invitees. A mammoth affair, the party, just like the book, was to be created from scratch by late autumn of 2006.

Creative
Spring’s creative approach to the book was to create a covetable environment for the wealth of

information that came out way in the form of interviews, old articles, site materials and thousands of photographs.

Our writer created a chronological account of the official and personal site history. We learnt about the many generations of some families who worked at Sizewell A, met the original diver and even the man who’d selected the site back in the early 1960’s. At the top of every page was a timeline of plant and national events, allowing us to map people's own lives against events like the birth of the world's first test tube baby and the reduction of voting age from 21 to 18.

Spring’s design team shared the mammoth task of scanning and photoshopping images, typesetting the pages and streaming content. Throughout the process our proofreader diligently checked, corrected and approved content which itself went through numerous iterations as different stakeholder groups commented.

Application
To keep costs reasonable we eschewed a hard cover, but to maintain a sense of quality and longevity we created a wrap over sleeve with a bronze ink finish over a gloss laminated soft cover. 

Both the metallic ink and the gloss lamination, incidentally, were eco-friendly, a true innovation back in 2006. By the time of the launch party we were proud to have delivered a few thousand beautiful books to the Magnox communications team who gifted them to all past and present staff and locals, much to everyone’s delight.

The huge party also caused delight, with entertainment provided by look-and-sound-alikes and photographs of every guest taken, processed and presented within the course of that one evening. The colossal marquee was decorated with huge prints of the iconic 1960’s photoshoot of a new Sizewell A, towering plants and atmospheric lighting. A dance floor fit for Chicago’s glory days occupied a quarter of the space and dancing continued long into the night.

For Spring, it was an early education into the community spiritedness in and around Sizewell and a privilege to be involved.