Pylon of the Month

Pylon of the Month - January 2012

Happy New Year to Pylon fans everywhere!!

We start 2012 with a Kenyan pylon (not the first to be featured, see October 2009 for the first Kenyan pylon). The wind and rain are rattling against the window as I write this and so after a rather miserable start to the year on the weather front, I thought that a clear blue sky was just what was needed to raise spirits everywhere. Sadly, I haven't been to Kenya but fans of the website sent this pylon picture in after spending a few weeks out there in 2011. As the safari jeeps drove slowly through the bush with everyone keeping a keen eye out for wildlife, a shout of "STOP" caught everybody's attention. Was it a lion, a cheetah or an elephant? No, it was this rather spendid pylon and so a photograph was taken and 'Pylon of the Month' was explained to some rather bemused fellow travellers .  Those with an interest in electricity generation will be keen to know that 80% of electricity consumed in Kenya is produced by the state owned Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) and that they run fourteen hydropower plants, three thermal power plants, two geothermal power plants and one wind farm.  

If a Kenyan pylon on its own isn't enough to get 2012 off to a flying start, pylon fans with an interest in art will be delighted to know that there is an exhibition this month in London (Camden to be more precise) of paintings by Joe Simpson.  The exhibition is called "Everything is Electrified" and it runs from January 20th-30th.  The  website has this to say about the paintings:

In a departure from his normal figurative paintings, Joe created the pieces with a range of media – including oil paint, marker pens, acrylic paint, ball-point pens and crayons.

Which all sounds very promising and one of the pictures is here to whet your appetite.

That's all for this month, but keep coming back during 2012 as there are lots of great pictures in the pipeline.

Pylon of the Month - November 2011

After all the excitement of September when Pylon of the Month featured on The One Show I have had a busy time and so hence the very delayed publication of a new pylon.  Normal service should be resumed in December, so for for all you pylon fans who have contacted me (there have been quite a few; seriously), there is no cause for alarm.  What else could I do for November other than to showcase the winning pylon from the Royal Institute of British Architects Pylon Design competition. 

As Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said:

”This is an innovative design which is simple, classical and practical. Its ingenious structure also means that it will be much shorter and smaller than existing pylons and therefore less intrusive. This competition has been a great success in bringing forward new and creative approaches to a pylon model which has not changed since the 1920s.We are going to need a lot more pylons over the next few years to connect new energy to our homes and businesses and it is important that we do this is in the most beautiful way possible.”

I have to confess that the winning design wasn't the one that I voted for as part of the public consultation, but now that I can see the winning design in a suitably festive landscape I can see why it won. If you want to look at all the entries (and some of them are really very imaginative if somewhat impractical) then look at the competition gallery. 

 

Pylon of the Month - September 2011

September marks the beginning of the new school year and so with this academic theme in mind I thought that an Oxford pylon would be appropriate.  This picture was taken from a bridge over the railway line about a mile or so south of the city centre in Kennington (very near the entrance to the Redbridge recycling centre if you are in the area and want to visit).  The picture is taken looking towards Oxford, the city famous for its 'Dreaming Spires', a term coined by Matthew Arnold in his poem 'Thyrsis'.  So perhaps the subtitle to this months post should be "The Dreaming Pylons of Oxford".

September promises to be a very exciting month for pylon fans in the UK.  Regular readers of this blog might remember that in May this year, I mentioned a competition that is underway to design the pylons of the future.  The 'Pylon Design Competition' is trying to choose a pylon design that is more aesthetically pleasing than the current industrial soldiers.  If you want to get a feel for cutting edge pylons, then look at these designs that won competitions in Italy and Iceland.  I have written before about the origins of the current UK design chosen by Reginald Blomfield (who was also on the committee that chose the design of the iconic red telephone box) and only last month about the origins of the word 'pylon'. So if you want to be a part of pylon history then you really should be in London on Wednesday 14th September at the Victoria and Albert Museum when the finalists in the competition will be announced by the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne. Sadly as it is at 11:00am, I can't be there, so I will have to work on getting an invitation to the announcement (in October) of the winner.  But I will play my part because the shortlist will be subject to public consultation and once I have found out how to comment, I will certainly be playing my part in shaping the future of pylons. 

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 2011

This month we head off to Suffolk, but before I say any more, I thought that I would give you an insight into how this month's pylon came to be chosen.  It is actually the first of my own photographs to feature for some time, because I have been inundated with pictures from across the globe recently .  But I thought I would take a break from foreign pylons until next month.  So this one was taken on a family holiday to Suffolk in Easter 2010.  After a lovely walk along the coast we returned to the car, which was parked near Sizewell, the site of two nuclear power stations. Sizewell A is now closed and being decommissioned, but Sizewell B remains operational and is Britain's only commercial Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR).  As we drove back to our cottage in Orford I snapped the pylons just after passing Sizewell.

So so far good, but I take a lot of pylon pictures that I never use.  This one popped back into my mind when I went to see Maggie Hambling speak at the Oxford Literary Festival just before Easter this year.  She was talking about her new book on the controversial scallop sculpture that she designed and which can be seen on the beach at Aldeburgh.  It wasn't controversial with us, we loved it, but it has been defaced on a number of occasions by others who feel that a man-made object on the beach is inappropriate.

Anyway, it is dedicated to Benjamin Britten (who lived and worked nearby for many years) and has words from his opera Peter Grimes, "I hear those voices that will not be drowned", cut out from the metal.  Then a couple of months later, a colleague went to see the English National Opera's production of Britten's opera "A Midsummer Night's Dream".  This was also controversial.  As the Daily Telegraph put it, "ENO's shocking new paedophile Midsummer Night's Dream is brilliant, but I hated it".  Then, whilst driving back from Oxford on a Saturday morning, I heard Radio 3 discussing Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn & Orchestra and enjoyed the chosen recording so much that I downloaded it from itunes (it is playing now as I write this).  

So with all the Benjamin Britten episodes in my life recently, the Suffolk pylon was chosen.  Not all the pylons have such an interesting back story, so this one seemed worth writing about.  If you've made it this far, I hope that you agree.

Pylon of the Month Word Cloud

I used Wordle to create a word cloud from the RSS feed of Pylon of the Month.  The bigger the word, the more often it appears on the website.  The fact that two recent pylons came from Australia is fairly obvious!

Pylon of the Month - May 2011

It has been another busy month and I was wondering whether to skip a month (again), but then events took a rather interesting turn when Pylon of the Month was mentioned on the PM programme on BBC Radio 4.  The average number of page views per day is about 36, but yesterday (24th May) I managed to reach 1250!  So this post is rather closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, but here goes anyway........

This pylon is another one sent in by a fan of the website and it was taken in St Anton whilst on a skiing holiday.  For those looking to track it down, my corespondent further added that "it is on the
side of the piste where the 2001 Downhill Skiing World Championships took place".  As you might expect for such a mountainous country, Austria produces over 50% of its power from hydropower.  If you want more details than that (and I know you do really) then I have discovered energy statistics heaven via the International Energy Agency (IEA) website.  In 2008 Austria produced 40678 GWh of hydroelectricity out of a total production of 67101GWh.  Look here if this has whetted your appetite.

Pylons have been much in the news recently with the launch of a competition to design the pylons of the future.  As the Guardian headline put it, "National Grid hopes opposition to new electricity pylons can be headed off with 'more visually acceptable' design".  There are references to two pylon competitions covered previously on Pylon of the Month in Iceland and Italy.  Hugh Duttton, the designer who won the Italian competition, had this to say about the current design:

"Traditional pylons are the very symbol of insensitive intervention of mankind on the landscape," he said. "These industrial soldiers that march across the countryside, galvanised steel trellis towers, are certainly optimal and efficient structures, but lack poetry."

Lets hope that the competition results in a design that makes them more acceptable, but it is difficult to seee opposition going away completely.  As in so many areas of life, there is a degree of hypocrisy or 'wanting our cake and eating it' about the arguments.  We want the electricity carried by the pylons without being willing to pay the price in terms of visual impact.  But burying all the cables would be far too expensive, although (as long as someone else is paying) this remains a popular option in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.  I await the results of the competition when they are announced in October.

 

Pylon of the Month - February 2011

This month's sees Pylon of the Month in the southern hemisphere for the first time.  A fan of the website from Australia sent this picture with the following information:

"Here are a few snaps from a recent road trip from Adelaide, South Australia to Melbourne, Victoria."

I use Google Analytics to see where my blog traffic is coming from and having just checked it, I can see that out of 32,781 visits since I started in June 2008 only 42 are from Australia.  If you really want to dig into the detail, 30 are from Adelaide, 8 from Sydney, 2 from Brisbane and 1 each from Perth and Melbourne.  The average time on the blog is just over a minute from Adelaide, but the lightweights from Brisbane can only hack it for an average of 27 seconds.  I'll be watching over the next few weeks to see if this changes.

Like the UK, Australia has 240V 50Hz electricity, and here are a few electricity factoids for Australia (from the World Nuclear Association website, so perhaps not entirely independent).

• Australia is heavily dependent on coal for electricity, more so than any other developed country except Denmark and Greece. Three quarters is derived from coal. 
• Natural gas is increasingly used for electricity, especially in SA and WA. 
• Australia has 27,640 km of transmission lines and cable (220 kV and above - 10,300 km 330 kV and above), mostly state-owned and operated, transporting 209 TWh* of electricity per year (2008-09).  There is no connection between the east of SA and WA.

*TWh is Terawatt hours where Tera means 1 x 10¹² or a thousand billion.

Pylon of the Month - January 2011

Happy New Year to pylon fans everywhere.  After a Christmas break where I failed to get any pylon pictures with accompanying snow and ice I decided to start 2011 with this rather marvellous image taken by a pylon fan very close to Radley, a few miles outside Oxford.  

I like it on a purely visual level and if all you want from Pylon of the Month is a chance to look at pictures of pylons then you might want to stop reading now. ......

because the picture could also be seen as a metaphor for what some see as the battle between science and the arts.  I probably need to explain in a little more detail!  As I discussed in a recent post, pylons are frequently seen as the all to obvious symbols of technology riding roughshod over aesthetic and environmental concerns.  It was Keats who first used the rainbow in the argument between the arts and science when he accused Newton of destroying its beauty by explaining it.  It inspired Richard Dawkins to write 'Unweaving the Rainbow' which argues that understanding actually enhances our appreciation of the beauty rather than destroying it and I'm with him on this one.  Richard Feynman, one of my scientific heroes, also had this to say on the subject:

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

So if you want to appreciate this month's pylon picture on a deeper level, then for more on the origin and background to Keat's comments, I can't recommend Richard Holme's book, 'The Age of Wonder' too highly.  Prior to this book, he was better known as a biographer of Romantic poets but this is an excellent account of the close interplay between science and the arts in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  For an account of the physics behind rainbows, here would be a good starting point.

Pylon of the Month - November 2010

After last month's rock and roll pylon, I decided to head abroad again with this picture submitted by yet another fan of the website.  The pylons are in the Arizona Desert near the City of Page ("the center of canyon country") and almost certainly carry electricity away from the coal fired Navajo Generating Station.

You can tell that pylons aren't in the UK just from their design and after watching the fantastic Secret Life of the National Grid on the BBC this month, I am a little more aware of the thought that went into designing the UK pylons.  I have mentioned the the man behind the design before, architect Giles Gilbert Scott, although he is more famous for designing the famous red telephone box and Battersea Power Station.  What I didn't know until I watched the programme was that the word pylon comes from the Greek word for the monumental gateway to an Egyptian temple.

I have to thank the BBC website for quite a lot of traffic recently (average page views per day is now at 28.93) and the Independent newspaper has also featured the blog in a couple of articles.  The first one brought to my attention was by Terence Blacker and was about the 'Secret Life of the National Grid' mentioned above.  Entitled 'Pylon fanciers will love this BBC propaganda'.  He says 'There are those who love pylons for their own sake. The more beautiful their rural setting, the happier the pylon-fanciers are.'  Whoa; steady on Terence.  I happen to be a passionate hill walker and climber and would not want to see pylons in the more beautiful areas of the UK.  In fact I'm inclined to agree with the point in your earlier article, that we put too low a value on the effect of pylons when doing the cost-benefit analysis, but there has to be a degree of realism.  I don't love pylons for their own sake, but I do think that we take the National Grid and the associated pylons for granted.  I also think that we undervalue engineers and the amazing things that they achieve in the UK.  And for what it's worth, I think we have the most aesthetically appealing pylons in the world.  At least, the TV critic of the Independent, Tom Sutcliffe, saw me in a more favourable light.  When reviewing 'The Secret Life of the National Grid', he wrote "I am grateful to it, though, for indirectly leading me to the Pylon of the Month blog – a celebration of global pylon design which proves that no object, however unlikely, is exempt from human enthusiasm." 

There you have it in a nutshell. Not love, not worship, but enthusiasm.  An enthuiasm for pylons.