London’s BT Tower landmark is set for a change of use after being snapped up by a US hotel chain, but not many people know there are 13 others situated across the country.
The former Post Office Tower is to be transformed into a hotel following the £275m sale, however the rest of the towers are still in use such as the one in Birmingham, which is used to send signals to people in parts of the UK that do not have access to fibre optic broadband via 80 small satellite dishes.
And one of the BT towers is almost twice the size of its more famous London cousin, with Emley Moor Tower standing at 330m tall as the tallest freestanding structure in the UK.
Based in Huddersfield, the tallest BT tower is a Grade II-listed building and was the fourth tallest freestanding building in the EU before Brexit.
The towers were initially built to deliver television, internet and telecommunication signals to the country, but the introduction of fibre optic broadband has seen their importance significantly reduced.
Now the towers cater for those the new technology has yet to reach and also deliver low-capacity fixed links to customer sites and mobile telephony.
BT actually owns a whopping 200 towers in the UK, but just 14 of these are in the style of London’s recognisable structure.
These are Stokenchurch, Charwelton, Pye Green, Wotton-under-Edge, Heaton Park, Sutton Common, Tinshill, Emley Moor, London, Birmingham, Morborne, Purdown, Tolsford Hill and Turners Hill.
Birmingham BT Tower is the UK’s third largest and was built well before the London tower in 1949, but unlike its cousin in the capital, the second city’s tower had to wait until 2018 to be illuminated, when Jasper Carrott switched on the lights.
Birmingham’s structure is in line of sight of two other towers in Pye Green and Sutton Common allowing signals to be passed quickly and effectively between the three.
The Morborne site is also home to the BBC’s emergency mast and the BT tower at this site collapsed following a fire in 2004 causing service outages for homes in and around Peterborough.
Tinshill and Turners Hill are BT’s smallest towers standing at just over 60m tall. The Tinshill mast was the subject of an investigation in 2002 which found radio emissions were well below levels which might cause a risk to health for people nearby.
The London structure will become the only tower which has taken on a new use since being taken on by the telecom company when it becomes a hotel in several years time.
