Electricity pylons can be super charged with strong and generally negative emotions, often reluctantly regarded as a necessary blight on the landscape or are passed unseen and unappreciated.
But not by me. I genuinely love their shapes and the patterns that they make as they cross the land but never seem to cross each other.
In the field next to where I live in the Sussex countryside, a line of them thread their way to the farm dwellings at the bottom. To me they are arteries on the earth taking electrical power to sustain and warm the people nearby.
Every pylon, in its landscape, has its own unique architecture in the sky. They stand like footings out of the clouds, where birds are the only creatures that are immune to their hidden and deadly charms.
Each pylon - and there are nearly 22,000 of them across England and Wales - is a different character. They vary from the simple, almost austere, three phase feeding a rural farm to the frankly crazed and multiple linking substation of an urban landscape, with dreadlock like 'hair' going in every direction.
The word pylon comes from the Greek as the word 'pyle' means gateway. Pylons were found in Ancient Egypt and were the impressive obelisk-shaped towers on either side of the doors to temples. Egyptology was all the rage in the Twenties, after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and the Boy King's mummy in 1922. And this was the decade when the first steel pylons were erected, the very first being in Scotland in 1928.
The design for pylons was the winning entry in a competition run by the Central Electricity Board in 1927. Leading architect Sir Reginald Blomfield often gets the credit for the ‘lattice’ design, which was intended to be more delicate than the more brutalist structures used in Europe and the United States. But the winning design, which still strides across our landscape today, was submitted to the competition by the Milliken Brothers, an engineering company based in the US, and chosen by Blomfield, designer of London’s Lambeth Bridge.
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