From 1914, residents of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia who possessed telephones had their calls connected through the Museum Telephone Exchange. A building on the North Crescent of Chenies Street, it owed its name to its closeness to the British Museum. Technology progressed, and in the late 1940s a small tower was added to the exchange to carry TV signals through the ether. Then, in the mid-1960s, even this giant step was dramatically surpassed by an astounding architectural creation on nearby Cleveland Street.
Topped out in 1964, it was initially known as the Museum Radio Tower. But by the time of its official opening by Prime Minister Harold Wilson on 8 October 1965 it was called the Post Office Tower. Its creator, the General Post Office, likened it to “a giant lighthouse above the London streets”. It was, at the time, the tallest building in the city and is still hailed as a monument to Wilson’s famous speech, made two years earlier, in which he had called for a Britain “forged in the white heat” of a revolution in technology. The connection is still made today, on the prow of the still-new 101 Cleveland Street building that fills the wedge formed by Cleveland Street and Clipstone Mews.
Gloriously, the tower was opened to the public in May 1966 by a combination of Postmaster General Viscount Stansgate, also known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and South Africa-born holiday camp tycoon Billy Butlin. It was two days after Queen Elizabeth II popped by, a few weeks after the classic London movie Alfie, starring Michael Caine, was released and Wilson had led Labour to a landslide general election triumph, and a couple of months before England won the World Cup at Wembley. London was the centre of the universe. Glory days.
The tower was, and is, rather sensational. Designed by the Ministry of Public Building and Works, it was built by Peter Lind & Company, a firm founded by a Danish engineer and a key contractor of Mulberry harbours, portable units that facilitated the Normandy invasion. The tower’s foundations are buried deep in London clay and it stretches 600 feet into the sky. Even now, renamed the BT Tower in 1991 after a spell as the Telecom Tower, it remains a space-age spectacle, a sci-fi pillar of glass and light that, although 60 years old, might tempt you to believe it had turned yesterday.
What, exactly, was it for? It housed micro radio wave aerials carrying phone chat from the capital to the rest of the UK. It transmitted TV signals everywhere. It was a mixed-use tower, too. Butlin ran a restaurant at the top, which slowly revolved. “This is a really exciting kind of epicurean thrill,” said a man from British Pathé. “The whole of London is yours…on a plate”. They served rum baba and duck à l’orange. There was a postage stamp, and everything.
The restaurant closed in 1980, but in 2003, the tower attained Grade II listed status and in 2015, to mark its 50th anniversary, it was temporarily re-opened. The BT boss of the time was busy bidding for a mobile phone company, and campaigning to stay in the European Union.
And then, one referendum and nine years later, BT sold its tower to the American hotel chain, MCR. Its conversion plans are now with Camden Council. They include a ground level public square, a swimming pool on the podium building and the return of the restaurant and viewing platform. It could be open in 2033.
Not all of the tower’s history has been happy and its Swinging Sixties symbolism was soon scarred. In 1971, a bomb was planted in the ceiling of a public viewing gallery toilet. It exploded at 4:30 in the morning, injuring no one but making a lot of mess. A man saying he was from the “Kilburn Battalion” of the Irish Republican Army called the police to claim responsibility. Someone else gave the Bill a bell, introducing themselves as one of the Angry Brigade, a bunch of anarchists who blew up about 25 places in the early 1970s and tried, without success, to kill a government minister.
No one was ever charged for the Post Office Tower attack, though nine members of the Angry Brigade stood trial for other things, included, at some length, the so-called Stoke Newington Eight, in 1972. Four of them were found guilty, the others were acquitted. Terrorism was big back then. Bigger than now. Perhaps a site tour should be arranged.
John Vane’s London novel, a political satire called Frightgeist, can be bought from this very website.
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