New generation of pylons carrying UK power supply will have to be very good to match up to designs of the 1930s
Skeletal giants, armoured knights of the National Grid, a regiment of electricity pylons has marched across our landscapes for the past 80 years. There are those who find these many-armed steel masts daunting, brutal and even loathsome.
There are those who campaign for high-voltage electricity cables to be buried underground, at great cost, wherever possible. There are others, like Stephen Spender who went so far as to write a - dreadful - poem about them: "Pylons, those pillars/Bare like nude, giant girls that/have no secret." Today, there is even a Pylon Appreciation Society, such is the mix of awe and fascination these divisive structures have on our collective imagination.
And, yet, 80 years ago, the former Central Electricity Board did its job remarkably well. A National Grid was clearly invaluable, although this demanded huge structures to carry cables from power stations to sub-stations that crackle and hum as we walk under them, thrilling in the rain.
Under the guidance of Sir Reginald Blomfield, a classical architect who wrote a fiercely anti-modern tract, Modernismus (1934) even as the grid coursed into unmitigated 20th century life, an American design by the Milliken Brothers for a standard pylon was chosen to revolutionise Britain's life and landscape. Since 1928, changes to the Millikens' design have been minimal. You can see all the variations on a website devoted to their evolution.
The Milliken pylons that strode across Britain from the 1930s were a compelling compromise between raw function and aesthetics.
They had - and retain - a filigree appearance that makes them at once as rigorous and as beautiful as a spider's web. Or, the rigging of clippers, the valve gear of steam locomotives, and the comforting necklaces of lit street lamps along arterial roads.
During the 1930s, public service design in Britain was characterised by a successful attempt to fuse classicism, modernity and new demands. The CEB's pylons were matched and mirrored by such convincing, long-lasting and mass-produced designs as Giles Gilbert Scott's K6 telephone kiosks and the London Passenger Transport Board's RT double-deck bus.
A new-generation pylon will have to be very good indeed to compare with the success of such designs, especially as it will always be - no matter how impressive - an object of loathing despite having a haunting beauty of its own.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/may/22/national-grid-pylons-design
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