Pylon of the Month

Pylon of the Month - August 2011

Tweet After a break from pylons in July, Pylon of the Month is back again and as summer is with us it is time for the pylon picture taken on my holidays.  This year, it comes from Greece and it was taken in the village of Agios Floros just north of Kalamata (famous for its delicious olives) as we drove back to Athens after a wonderful two weeks on the Mani peninsula.  We stayed in Kardamili, a small but beautiful village that until recently was the home of the famous travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.  His book, Mani, is well worth a read if you want to get a feel for this part of Greece as it was in the 1950s.  His most famous book, however, is probably 'A Time of Gifts' which tells the story of the first part of his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s.  He fought in the Second World War and led the raid that captured and evacuated the German Commander from Crete as made famous by the film ''Ill met by Moonlight'.

On one day trip we went to Pylos and it did occur to me that there might be a link between Pylos and pylons.  If there is I can't find it, but I did stumble across an excellent discussion on the origin of the word pylon (meaning a tower carrying electricity cables).  Keen pylon fans will already know that the original use of the word was to describe the gateway to an Egyptian temple, but the first use in the modern sense cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1923 (pre-dating the building of the National Grid which began in 1928).  

"A tall tower-like structure erected as a support for a cable, etc.; spec. (now the principal use) a lattice-work metal tower for carrying overhead electricity lines. 
1923 E. SHANKS Richest Man iii. 52 Half a mile up the mountain, a cable, a thin black line, traversed the crystal air, borne up on pylons"   

It is not clear how 'pylon' came to have this meaning but there is much interesting etymological discussion to had here for those keen to expand their pylon knowledge.  The Pylon Poets (see this previous Pylon of the Month post for further details) do get a mention in the OED as well and one contributor to the discussion wonders if they played a part in popularising the use of the word with a deliberately ironic reference to ancient monuments.  Fascinating stuff and if you ever meet anyone who thinks that pylons are boring, do enlighten them.

Pylon of the Month - June 2010

As June is now with us and summer really does seem to be 'icumen in' I was drawn to this rather bucolic photograph submitted by a fan of the website.  It is just off the A38 (aka the Devon Expressway) between Exeter and Okehampton in Devon and so would be an ideal stop off for pylon fans heading to the West Country for their holidays this summer.  As far as I am aware, the cows are the first animals to feature in a pylon photograph on this website.  Another first for Pylon of the Month.

Other than this month's pylon, my cup really does overfloweth with othyer pylon related news.  First up is a campaign to rebuild the Skylon.  Its not quite a giant pylon, but fans of large steel erections might want to vote on a suitable location for it if it does get rebuilt to mark the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain. It would certainly be a very visible reminder of the wealth of engineering and design talent in the UK.

The second bit of news I discovered by looking at the sources of traffic for this blog.  It is mainly word of mouth (so people google 'pylon of the month' having already heard of it), but I do get the odd mention elsewhere.  One of the blogs that has been sending traffic my way recently is Wartime Housewife, which in a recent post discusses the origins of the National Grid and Sir Reginald Blomfield who was charged with deciding on pylon design.  The quote below is from Pastoral Peculiars by Peter Ashley (via Wartime Housewife above).

If you had to design a tower to carry 400,000 volts worth of electricity, the pylon is not a bad solution.  Even at the start of the National Grid,  there were sensibilities about the impact of such things and they brought in Sir Reginald Blomfield to look at the design possibilities.  Blomfield had been on the Royal Fine Arts Commission that had chosen Giles Gilbert Scott’s design for the red telephone box and Scott, architect of Liverpool Cathedral and Battersea Power Station, has always been associated with the pylon project.

I am going to make it my mission to find out more about the genesis of the pylon.

 

Pylons and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

As December looms, I thought I would mention a book that pylon fans could add to their Christmas list.  The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain De Botton has a whole chapter (called Transmission Engineering) dedicated to pylons.  The author and a member of the Pylon Appreciation Society follow a pylon line from the nuclear power plant in Dungeness all the way to Canning Town whilst musing on life, work and other subjects.  It is really is an excellent book.  One section particularly caught my eye.  It refers to a book (originally published in Dutch although I can find no reference to it) called The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape by Anne Mieke Backer and Arij de Boode.  They make the case for appreciating the beauty of pylons and apparently note that windmills were as unpopular once as pylons are now.  They were occasionally burnt to the ground and denounced from pulpits before the painters of the Dutch Golden Age started including them in their landscapes thereby contributing to their acceptance.  Perhaps the same will be true for pylons in the future.

 

Pylon Poetry from Stephen Spender

Thank you to Johnathan Glancey in the Guardian for bringing my attention to poetry about pylons in this article about 'The  gaunt skeletal beauty of pylons'.  Knowing that well known poets like Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis were inspired by pylons somehow makes this whole blog seem a little less geeky.  In fact, according to this glossary of poetic terms, 'pylon poets' is a term for a 'group of 1930s left wing poets known for their use of industrial imagery'.  See this Guardian article, 'Sacred Indignation' for a lengthy but fascinating discussion of the pylon poets and the similarities between the 1930s and the current economic situation.

 

The Pylons – Stephen Spender 

 

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages 

Of that stone made, 

And crumbling roads 

That turned on sudden hidden villages. 

 

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete 

That trails black wire; 

Pylons, those pillars 

Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret. 

 

The valley with its gilt and evening look 

And the green chestnut 

Of customary root, 

Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook. 

 

But far above and far as sight endures 

Like whips of anger 

With lightning's danger 

There runs the quick perspective of the future. 

 

This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek 

So tall with prophecy: 

Dreaming of cities 

Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.