Pylon Poetry

The Sesquipedalist has a fine little vignette (originally in the AJ) on the way the onset of the Electricity Pylon was received by the British architectural press, and how such a project would be all but unimaginable given the tendency of those who live far enough from cities to despise anything that might improve anyone else's life. Certainly the mention of protests against wind turbines always brings out the dirigiste in me - a bit of compulsory purchase should shut up the bloody whiners. It's absolutely extraordinary that these structures were designed by notorious RIBA boss Sir Reginald Blomfield at exactly the same time he was writing the Blimpish, racist anti-Modernist screed Modernismus (which I have read, and it is exactly as you'd expect - like a sort of Herrenvolk Simon Jenkins).



Two interesting things not in this account that are worth mentioning - for one, the way Pylons were beloved of Continental Modernists. One of the strangest things about Walter Gropius' Dessau-Torten Siedlung, already a very strange place indeed, is the way it is arranged around electricity pylons, in very close proximity to houses, as if they were the 'temples to machinery in the abstract' that Wyndham Lewis once recommended as a solution to all architectural ills, in place of the parish kirche. Also, it made me think straight away of Stephen Spender's 'The Pylons', one of the more intriguing works from the Oxbridge Neo-Georgian Stalinist milieu. The poem posits the Pylon as the harbinger of the new age, rising out of a country tied to its local stone as a vision of a future less riven by shame and nostalgia, 'bare like giant nude girls that have no secret'. Spender writes of the Pylon as a prophecy, the outlines of a skyscraping metropolis that he dreamt would eventually engulf the British countryside. So with a traditionalist like Blomfield designing these millennarian steel skeletons, we have England killing the thing it loves, again.