Then, as the big day approached, a modest proposal arrived from a Balmoral functionary: ‘Her Majesty mentioned to me that she would be interested in due course to pay an informal visit to the tower.’32 After another round of panicked discussions the idea was vetoed, and a second opening ceremony, this time a royal one, was hastily arranged for the following year.
I had an opportunity to witness Eric Bedford’s designs first-hand when I was given a tour of the building by BT’s genial archivist, David Hay, while my friend Richard lurked around taking pictures. I was nervous about the full airport-style security check in the lobby, especially as my passport had expired the previous week. As we emptied our coins and phones and keys into the plastic trays provided, in the lobby beyond a group of business people waited to ascend. Presumably this is how BT make money out of the building, by renting it out to a select few corporate clients. When the Post Office Tower opened it had been a much more public affair. Sir Billy Butlin had won the tender to provide, on the thirty-sixth floor, the famously revolving Top of the Tower restaurant.i The public restaurant has long-since closed, but it still revolves three times a day for those lucky corporate clients.
We ascended in the super-fast lift, taking 40 seconds to reach T35, the viewing gallery – the level from which Frank Goldsmith had fallen back in 1964. The view was spectacular, giving a whole new perspective on London; a city of towers we might think it, but from up there it looked built on a very small, domestic scale – though the thought of confronting it without a protective layer of glass was terrifying. By 2013 six London buildings stood taller, but they were all huddled in the east: the nearby landmarks of Centre Point and the Euston Tower were dwarfed by this futuristic spire. The décor, however, was disappointing. Devoid of any period detail, it adhered to the kind of bland, neutral scheme favoured by television property developers looking for a quick sale.
T35: The viewing gallery of the BT Tower. © Richard de Pesando
After a 30-minute question-and-answer session, David led us down in the lift to one of the most unexpectedly exciting places on my journey – T14, one of the equipment floors midway up the tower. No imagination was needed to picture what this would have been like when it first opened: all the original sixties equipment was still there. Towering racks of grey trim phones and stacks of multi-coloured plug boards filled the floorspace, and the Tower’s central column was masked by the kind of black plastic matrix and once-white clip-on lettering more commonly seen on unrefurbished café walls. This was geek heaven. The floor had been more or less abandoned since the millennium, although we did startle one cheery engineer who had worked on this floor in the nineties, and who, it transpired, still popped into the abandoned office from time to time for sentimental reasons.
Technology from the sixties to the noughties rubs shoulders on Floor 14. © Richard de Pesando
In the late nineties BT engineers were still using oscilloscopes and plug boards in the tower to beam, test and adjust signals. But as digital, mobile phone and internet bandwidth was progressively sold off to private companies, there was less and less for tower engineers to do. Now these floors stand quiet, dusty and abandoned. At one point I sat down at an antique grey metal desk with built-in acrylic buttons and an oscilloscope readout, and nonchalantly pressed a control. The entire desk sprang to life, lights twinkling, needles twitching on the read-out dials. I suddenly remembered the 1967 film Smashing Time, where two girls end up at the top of the tower at a happening party, and the revolve goes wildly out of control. I hurriedly switched the desk off.
Never touch antiquated equipment in the BT Tower. © Richard de Pesando
I gazed around at the yellowing type-written instruction manuals; the fire drills and log books; the filing cabinets full of sticky vinyl folders; the Dymo tape informing technicians how to adjust the signals in case of adverse weather conditions; the eighties faxes; the seventies answering machines. The thick green glass windows were grubby, with vertical silver anodised aluminium blinds blocking out most of the view. The glass was a patented system of 9.5mm thick anti-sun glazing designed to minimise that curse of all glass-walled office blocks – solar heat gain. Somehow it wasn’t a surprise when the startled engineer told us that, despite the crowded, cluttered, potentially claustrophobic space on these floors, the technicians had really liked working there, and missed it.
The final stop on our tour was the lower ground floor, known as The Pyramid for reasons that soon became obvious. To reach it we had to leave the building, and enter through an anonymous-looking door in the loading bay, which appeared as though it might lead to a broom cupboard rather than into the foundations of one of London’s most recognisable landmarks. Hard hats on, we climbed straight down a ladder. At the bottom we stooped under some low-hanging bundles of cabling and drainpipes – and there in the damp, cold gloom we could make out the massive form of The Pyramid. It was a huge, rough concrete sandcastle built underground, with the core of the tower sticking out of the top like a flag. A narrow track ran round its perimeter. Here was the roughest of shuttering, concrete in its most brutal form – great grey beams of it that formed the walls and the floor and held up the roof. We could hear water trickling down the walls, and David informed us that no one had yet identified the source. He suggested we climb down from the gantry, along the precarious narrow planks of the makeshift walkway, and scramble to the foot of the steep concrete slope so we could walk round the base of The Pyramid itself. The trickling water had pooled on the floor, and splashing through this man-made cave in the gloom with our hard hats on felt more like a potholing expedition than a tour of Britain’s most hi-tech sixties building. I hadn’t thought to dress for an adventure in the underworld, and my new trainers were instantly ruined.
With The Pyramid rising above us, David explained the origins of the design. The heavy London clay made deep foundations impossible, so instead the building had to be supported on a wide, flat base that sprawls underground from The Pyramid. Essentially the Post Office Tower was designed according to the same principles as a standard lamp.
On the way back up I spotted that on one of the rough concrete beams someone had drawn stick men. Nearby was scrawled that quintessential sixties acronym: LSD. There at the base of this hi-tech telecoms tower was one of the oldest human forms of communication – cave drawings.
Underground, visiting the ‘pyramid’ beneath the tower. © Richard de Pesando
The Post Office Tower was just one of a wave of atomic-age structures created to house new technology. In 1956 the Queen opened Calder Hall nuclear power station in Cumbria; situated next to the military nuclear processing plant at Windscale, it was the first in the world to provide energy for domestic use. The Engineering Gas Research Station, designed by architects Ryder and Yates to resemble a scaled-up laboratory bench of funnels and flasks, opened in 1967 in Killingworth, near Newcastle. The likes of Frederick Gibberd and Robert Matthew were called upon to design new airport terminals at Gatwick and Edinburgh to cope with the boom in passenger numbers. The magnificent Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Experimental Station in Cheshire remains the largest steerable dish radio telescope in the world, and was completed in 1957. Then there was Antenna One, or Arthur, a parabolic dish built in 1962 at Goonhilly Downs in Cornwall, constructed to link with the telecommunications satellite, Telstar.
Most of these buildings were constructed on moors, heaths or downs, away from the general public. The Post Office Towers in London and Birmingham were the urban face of technological supremacism. The London tower rapidly permeated popular culture. Even before the it had opened, The Eagle comic was featuring it on the front page, as part of a 1964 Dan Dare story in which a dangerous alien had roused the bored teenagers of London into a revolutionary seizure of the tower. In 1966 it fell foul of another malign force, this time on television, when it was taken over by a giant computer called WOTAN, eventually to be defeated by a time-travelling alien on the BBC at Saturday teatime. Perhaps most memorably, in 1971 the
entire tower was destroyed by a giant marauding kitten in The Goodies in one of the decade’s classic television comedy moments.
That episode of The Goodies aired just two weeks after a real-life attack changed the fortunes of the tower for good. At 4:30am on 31 October 1971 security man Fred Graham was alone in the restaurant on the thirty-second floor when he heard a loud bang from the viewing gallery. ‘Suddenly the floor heaved,’ he told the Daily Mirror. ‘My chair went up a couple of inches and I was on the floor. I thought, Christ, I’ve had it, this is my lot.’33 A bomb had exploded on the floor above. Mustafa Bohour, who was watching from his top floor flat opposite the tower’s entrance, described the scene: ‘When I got to the window, debris was flying all over the place. Bits of metal were crashing onto the street outside. I could see my neighbour’s car with its windscreen smashed and falling bricks had broken the roof of my lorry.’34 Despite a warning the previous day, and a call claiming that the ‘Kilburn Battalion’ of the IRA was responsible for the bomb, a thorough investigation failed to identify the perpetrator.ii
The damage done by the bomb was soon repaired, but its effects were far reaching. Billy Butlin’s revolving restaurant, a huge attraction since the time of opening, was informed that its lease would not be renewed, and by the end of the decade it had closed. Notwithstanding seasonal visits from Noel Edmonds for the BBC, and the frequent rebrandings of the privatised telecoms company which owned it, the tower began its long slide into seclusion and disuse. It remains a relic of an age where the state invested in industry and technology, a symbol of a lost vision of the future, of what was once possible, and the way we did things. It still towers on the skyline, but like some historic castle, it is devoid of function. Intended to demonstrate Britain’s status at the vanguard of cutting edge innovation, it was completed at a time when the country’s international influence was waning fast. Pretty soon all it seemed to add up to was a relay station for transmitting the cricket or regional adverts.
Even so, it’s clear BT don’t realise what they have here. Bursting with fascinating if outmoded technology, this temple of geek is a historic site of the communication world, like the huts at Bletchley Park. It contains the relics of the future – for some a haul as exciting as any number of crossbows, gold coins and pottery. In 2010 the management team was quite unprepared for the huge number of requests for tickets when they added it to the Open House Weekend programme, and they had to turn away most of the people who applied. The floors halfway up the tower are like a time capsule or a sealed tomb, just waiting for new generations to come, gasp with delight and set about cataloguing the incredible artefacts and hazard a guess at their meaning.
‘British architects are well through the novelty phase of skyscraper building,’ planner Lionel Brett wrote in 1961. ‘Many are in fact alarmed at the effect on our old city silhouettes and open spaces of a proliferation of second-rate flat-tops with off-the-peg curtain walls.’35 By the late sixties Concrete Quarterly was echoing his fears. ‘The highly conventional “style” of international architecture is spreading a pall of monotony over the world’s cities,’ they reported, feeling it was time to ‘introduce a more regional note into modern architectural design’.36 Richard Seifert, Colonel of the curtain wall, had also become deeply critical of the standards reached by his peers. ‘The complexities and functional problems have, for a long time, taken precedence over the aesthetic and architectural appreciation of design,’ he wrote in the early seventies, ‘thus derogating the appearance of buildings in our cities.’37
Appearance was one thing, but as time marched on and the pace of technological change accelerated through the seventies and early eighties, even the most modern-seeming office blocks of the previous two decades began to appear unfit for purpose. No sooner was the NatWest Tower finished, for example, than it was deemed to lack the trunking and cabling necessary for a modern bank with hundreds of desktop computers. Millions of pounds had to be spent converting it. Adapting to the needs of the digital age has been as tough on Centre Point and the Post Office Tower as it has on Georgian or Victorian buildings. From Croydon to the City of London, the mirrored towers of the fifties and sixties all became obsolete at the same time: the moment that Docklands could provide buildings native to the new technological age. Richard Seifert’s humblebrag that ‘future generations might be better judges of the exhilarating view of London’s modern skyline,’ was predicated on the notion that the modern skyline would still be there for future generations to observe.38 But as many of his most recognisable buildings, from Telstar House to New London Bridge House and Draper’s Gardens, are erased, the towering achievements of even this most prolific of architects may be returned to the obscurity that a largely disapproving and envious architecture profession would have wished on him from the very start.
Notes
1 Daily Express, 4/2/06, p34
2 Michael Rosenauer, Modern Office Buildings, Batsford, 1955, p19
3 Oliver Marriott, The Property Boom, Pan Piper, 1969, p44
4 Sir William Holford, inaugural address as President of RIBA, The Times, 2/11/60, p6
5 Michael Rosenauer, Modern Office Buildings, Batsford, 1955, p75
6 Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1360803/Richard-Seifert.html
7 Rosenauer, p31
8 Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave, Pelican, 1983, p55
9 The Times, 19/1/74, p1
10 The Times, 29/6/72, p3
11 The Times, 29/6/72, p3
12 Richard Seifert, Financial Times, 21/6/71, p26
13 Richard Seifert, The Listener, 27/10/77, p554 (interview for Arena)
14 Marriott, p217
15 Marriott, p212
16 Peter Saunders, Urban Politics, Hutchinson and Co, Third Edition 1983, p301
17 Guardian, 3/7/62, p10
18 Saunders, p299
19 Croydon Official Guide, London Borough of Croydon, 1971, p43
20 The Times, 11/9/70, p3
21 Croydon Official Guide, London Borough of Croydon, 1969, p72
22 Saunders, p303
23 Tony Benn, Daily Express, 9/10/65, p5
24 Geoffrey Moorhouse, Guardian, 21/3/64, p7
25 Letter from Reginald Bevins to Sir Ronald German, 6/11/63
26 Letter from T. A. O’Brien, 15/1/64
27 Letter from A. W. C. (Bill) Ryland (Director of Inland Telecommunications) to K. H. (Kenneth) Cadbury (head of mechanisation), 16/7/64
28 Letter from Kenneth Cadbury to Bill Ryland, 23/7/64
29 Minutes of the Post Office Tower Project Team, 5/11/64
30 Letter from Anthony Wedgwood Benn to Harold Wilson, 17/12/64
31 Letter from T. A. O’Brien to Kenneth Cadbury, 16/7/65
32 Letter from Edward Ford (Balmoral) to Sir Ronald German, 20/8/65
33 Fred Graham, Daily Mirror, 1/11/71, p16
34 The Times, 1/11/71, p1
35 Lionel Brett, The Times, The Architect in Britain Today supplement, 3/7/61, piv
36 Editorial, Concrete Quarterly, October-December 68, p1
37 Richard Seifert, Financial Times, 21/6/71, p26
38 Richard Seifert, Financial Times, 21/6/71, p26
i This famous London landmark had first revolved for diners in Ipswich, when managers at Ransomes and Rapier, who made and tested the revolving floor, had staged a lunchtime ‘occupation’ of it while it had stood in their construction shop.
ii It wasn’t the first time that windows had been replaced on the Tower. According to the Daily Mirror report: ‘When the BBC “24 Hours” team took over the floor on the opening night, some of their more impulsive guests scratched some rude drawings on the glass.’ The windows, which were on the observation deck, were hastily repaired.
6. ‘A Village With Your Children in Mind’
SPAN AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR DREAMS OF NEW ASH GREEN (1957–1972)
‘What was that place that used to make everyone laugh?’ asked Jo Griffiths unexpectedly when I visited her and town planne
r husband Jim to talk about the new town of Cwmbran. ‘Was it New Ash Green? Why did it make people laugh?’ Jim was quick to deny that New Ash Green had ever made anyone laugh – and to point out the differences between it and Cwmbran, where they had lived.
‘It was the private sector version,’ he explained, ‘and it was expensive and very small. Very nice, but bijou. Funnily enough, New Ash Green is nearer to the garden village model,’ he said. We looked out of the window of their home in the quaint Edwardian garden village of Rhiwbina, with its cluster of Arts and Crafts style cottages. ‘It wasn’t a town.’
Two months later I was walking around New Ash Green to decide for myself just how funny it was.
It was late August when I took the train 25 miles out of London into the Kent countryside. From the train window I watched as clouds dragged their long shadows across golden, harvested fields. In ancient woodland, red and yellow leaves had begun to fall from the old oaks. I was travelling to the heart of the green belt, out beyond the creeping tendrils of suburbia. New Ash Green is a couple of miles from the nearest station, so I took a taxi, and could hear the quiet amusement in the driver’s voice as I told him where I was headed. Perhaps Jo was right – even 40 years later, the novelty had not worn off.
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