The BT Tower

The Post Office Tower in London became the BT Tower when the Post Office changed its name to British Telecom.

From the 1960s it relayed microwave signals for telephone calls, television broadcasts, and data across the UK.

Part was used for technical equipment, and the rest was office buildings, with a revolving restaurant at the top.

Optical fibre cables run underground nowadays, so no one would want to build the tower now.

When newer technology overtook it, the tower stood unused. Lat year a property group bought it to turn it into a hotel.

Since moving to London I keep being surprised at how often I see it at the end of this or that street in Marylebone and Fitzrovia.

The many fine buildings on those streets sneer at the tower, and in reply it glares at them from on high, with its bright band of purple.

It is a Grade II listed building, so its continued standing is more or less guaranteed. Or perhaps not because the tower used to be taller.

It had antennae on top and they were removed because the stanchions were becoming unsafe. BT had to obtain Listed Building Consent to remove the antennae.

Perhaps the new owners have ideas. Perhaps a swing. It would not be the first.

On top of the A’dam tower on the north side of the Ej in Amsterdam, (the body of water that separates Amsterdam North from the rest of the city), is a swing on a cantilevered section. Buy a ticket and you can swing out over nothing, 100 metres above the ground.

BT Tower Closeup

This is a crop of image R000770, the middle of three photos I took of the tower, when I was on the street. The camera is a Ricoh GR III, a APS-C sensor, smaller than full frame – and look at the detail it can pull out of a tower off in the distance. And remember that on any day in a city the haze interferes with light transmission, and heat rising causes heat haze.