London's BT Tower celebrates its 40th birthday

The great communicator

As the BT Tower celebrates its 40th birthday, Jonathan Glancey examines the lasting appeal of a 60s icon

Friday October 7, 2005


BT Tower, previously known as the Post Office Tower. Photograph: Sarah Lee

Peering over the rooftops of central London like some catwalk-thin Dalek, the BT Tower celebrates its 40th birthday this weekend.
Formerly known as the Post Office Tower, and very much a part of the white hot technological revolution championed by Harold Wilson's Labour governments of the 1960s, when Tony Benn was Anthony Wedgwood-Benn and the Postmaster-General, the 620ft telecommunications mast remains as special and as perennially youthful as ever.

When the Tower opened for operations on Friday, October 8 1965, with the prime minister making a ceremonial call to the lord mayor of Birmingham, the Daleks were youthful stars of BBC's Dr Who, Concorde had yet to make its maiden flight, Che Guevara had precisely two years to live before he "lived" on t-shirts, steam expresses still ran from Waterloo and across much of the North of England, man had yet to walk on the Moon and the abolition of the UK death penalty was still a month away.

Still, the well-off could invest in a brand new Sony Betamax home video recorder if only to find something else to watch other than The Sound of Music which continued to do-ray-me around the nation's cinemas.
For those in a hurry to make trunk calls on the blower, the Post Office Tower was the answer. It could microwave, at a time when the nation's largely unfitted kitchens were still strangers to the microwave oven, important business calls faster than the new blue 100mph west coast intercity electrics, faster than a BEA Trident on an internal flight, faster than an Aston-Martin DB5 or, for that matter, faster than fairies, faster than witches, the length and breadth of Britain.

Microwave calls would beam out and into the steel-and-glass clad tower from a network of sibling towers, none of them so high and none so well-dressed as the sleek Post Office Tower itself.

Although declared a national monument in 2001 by English Heritage, rather like Paul McCartney receiving a knighthood, and listed Grade 2 by the government in 2003, the Post Office Tower, as its fans still prefer to call it, continues to play an important role in transmitting television programmes and telephone conversations.

The Tower, though, almost never made it much past the tender age of six. On 31st October 1971, someone exploded a bomb on its 31st floor, which led to the closure of the public viewing galleries, a hugely popular attraction for Londoners and tourists alike in the late Sixties.

The PO Tower had been the equivalent of the London Eye, the best place to see London in the round, and especially so if you were lucky enough to dine in its famous revolving 120-seat Top of the Tower restaurant run by Billy Butlin of holiday camp fame.

Here, you could sit in comfort, with a G&T to cradle, prawn cocktail, sirloin steak, wine-in-a-basket with the meal, and all the trimmings, as London appeared to circle around you.

Seated on plush banquettes, diners could see Sidcup with their soup, Plaistow over the prawns and Ealing with the entree. Approximately 105,000 diners circled the city in the Tower's first year, the 11ft wide floor section they sat on travelling, courtesy of a 2.5hp electric motor, at a soup-steady 0.17mph, completing a circle every 22 minutes.

The sandwich, flask and Penguin biscuit brigade also turned up in force, from May 19 1966, when Wedgwood-Benn and Billy Butlin declared The Tower open to the public.

During that white hot first public year, when Britain won the World Cup, almost one million visitors paid 4/- [20p] to queue to ride one of the Tower's two lifts to the open and closed viewing galleries (the first was equipped, like a bird cage, with fine steel bars) at the prodigious rate of 1,000 feet per minute, which is still extremely fast.

Construction of the £2.5m tower designed by Eric Bedford (1909-2001), architect of the backdrop to the Queen's Coronation in 1953 as well as of the now demolished Department of the Environment slabs overshadowing Westminster Abbey, began in 1961.

A Mr G R Yeats was project architect, while a Mr S G Silham was structural engineer. Due to its highly technological nature, the Tower was always more of an engineering feat than an architectural one.

As a result, we know how much it weighs, 13,000 tons, as well as the degree to which it is designed to sway, about 8 inches, in winds of up to 100mph. In winter the Tower contracts; in summer it expands by as much as nine inches.

The concrete shaft was, however, wrapped around in 50,000 square feet of glass, unlike the plain concrete towers it relays its messages to, and, so, has always had the look of a very thin office tower. The "offices" behind the tinged, sun-protected glass are, however, both very small and, to a large extent, filled with electrical and electronic equipment of one sort or another.

The Tower, by the way, is actually 580ft tall; the extra 40ft is a trellis-type mast entwined with radar and weather equipment.

A Ken Adam-designed James Bond film set come to life, the Tower has been dismissed as "poorly proportioned and clumsily detailed" by Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward, authors of the otherwise impeccable A Guide to the Architecture of London.

Nevertheless, it has remained a favourite London landmark. It's not so much the way it looks, but the fact that so many of us associate it with a mythical swinging London.

It is also one of those functional buildings, or structures, like pylons, cooling towers, early warning radar masts, water towers, and Martello towers, that have their own special poetry.

It continues to work hard for its living in our super-cool, whizzy, ahistorical, casino-crazy, 24-hour digital age. And, try as you might to get it out of your sights, the Post Office, or BT, Tower is, happily, like Mount Everest or the Queen, quite simply there.

· Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic