Background

Origin

This all started with the first Coronavirus lockdown in the UK (March 2020). As I was working from home, I started taking Saturday walks to get my exercise. I took my battered old camera along with me to photograph anything interesting. On the early walks I found myself disappointed that I never encountered any pylons, but as time passed and I walked greater distances, I started coming across them.

During Coronavirus walks 67 to Flamstead (17th July 2021), a strange pylon in Redbourn caught my attention. I nicknamed it “Thorn” owing to its resemblance to the robot of the same name from the ’90s video game One Must Fall 2097. There were two strange projections at the top with no apparent purpose. While reviewing the photos on my camera later on during the walk, I realised that there were no apparent dangly wires: the two sides of the pylon didn’t seem to be connected to each other, which made no sense.

I photographed another strange pylon in April 2022: this one had arms that extended further than seemed necessary, again without reason. With only 3× zoom and having yet discovered a way to get closer to it, I could only manage very distant shots of it.

The two types are shown below. The photographs are terrible. The second one was after I dropped the camera several feet onto tarmac.

Photos two through four have been “improved” but they are not really salvageable.

Genesis

Eventually (and I no longer recall when), I could no longer contain my curiosity and I decided to show my finds to Flash Bristow of the Pylon Appreciation Society to see what she made of them. I never got a reply. This wasn’t a huge surprise, as so many people never respond (or respond once and then vanish). In the meantime, I did some digging and managed to identify at least the purpose of the projections on the first type: they are top crossarm extensions to support vertical downleads. This still left two questions: why would the pylon be configured that way, and why were the two sides disconnected from each other?

I wrote again to Flash: still no reply. (I later learnt the reason why: she had passed away in 2020.)

The Pylon Appreciation Website carried a small amount of information, but not much. There was said to be a field guide available to members, but as my goal is to make knowledge publicly available, I felt that there would be a conflict of interest to share information gained from membership.

I decided that I needed to create a public reference guide to pylons, a “spotter’s guide” if you will, and entirely without any information offered to society members. I would surely not be the only person interested in the subject. Publicly available information from National Grid allowed me to start putting together some information.

The first diagrams posted were PL16 D2S (albeit listed as “D”), L4(m) D and L7(c) D on the 26th of July 2022. The material was rapidly expanded throughout August. How quickly it was all put together later came as a surprise to some people, who thought that I had spent years researching the subject. This was not so!

Much of the UK information on Flash’s site had come from Dr Ian McAulay, but the information had gone out of date as the company he worked (Envision) for had closed down. On the 31st of July 2022 I succeeded in tracking him down. He provided me with a copy of the “tower bible”, a PDF put together by Jon Bruford of various Central Electricity Authority tower drawings (by this time I’d learnt that they are “towers” and not “pylons”, despite the latter being less ambiguous) and shared within the community until it disappeared. Tracing all these 1950s drawings as SVG formed the bulk of the early material.

With this all done, I thought I had covered much of what was in the UK; this would turn out to be far from the truth.

Progress

From August 2022, I started going on “pylon hunts”. From the first walk through to the next spring, all the photos were shot using my old camera, and many are ruined beyond repair. Those from July 2023 onwards were taken with a marginally less pants camera: still a massive exercise in frustration but finally the photos were sharp, clear and free from lens contamination and dead pixels.

From discussion with Ian, research on Google and exploration it started to become clear just how little the pylon enthusiast community had learned or discovered in its 15-year existence, from its foundation in 2005 to Flash’s death in 2020. A considerable amount of the photographs posted to the Pylon Appreciation Society were lost, and the members scattered and unreachable. Some of the National Grid material I had made use of was known to the community but no-one before me had ever knowingly tried to catalogue the UK’s pylon types.

Once I had created a site (or rather, a section of the site) dedicated to UK pylons, this attracted occasional attention from others. This in turn led to the arrival of a lot of new material that allowed for much greater coverage expansion. Having a substantial body of work had demonstrated that there was something worth contributing to.

The site has even found use by a contractor and a power company as a reference. One fellow noted, “The amount of time and money spent on every job just verifying whats in the field would make your head spin.” It turns out that even the power industry can sometimes find a large visual reference of tower types useful.

Although I never have and likely never work in the power sector, the technical details are also interesting: what each part of a tower does and what it is called. Details on towers and power lines have also been added and will also grow.

Future

The primary objective remains the same: to provide a visual reference of accurate scale diagrams of all standard British towers, from 33 up to 400 kV. There is still a long way to go, and at every step of the journey from 2022 until the present it has never been clear how far this project is likely to go. Right from the start I figured that it would only go so far and then stall. Thanks to various contributors, it has grown much more than I had ever imagined, but the scope has grown almost as fast!

Answers

For those wondering, the two mystery towers above are:

1. L7(c) DT, terminal tower with top crossarm extensions
2. SEE PL1(a) DX, transposition tower rewired as a section tower