Let’s go up the BT Tower, yes?

by typecat

It’s quite difficult to get up the BT Tower these days. Not because you have to shimmy up the outside in special sticky spider man gloves and socks, that would be fun. No, because the powers that be have decided to close it to the public and make you enter the only ballot tougher than the London Marathon ballot in order to get a ticket- the Open House Day ballot. Open House, incidentally, has the worst website I have ever seen. It is – like Top Shop on a Saturday morning – unbrowsable.

No matter. As someone who knows someone who supports Freedom From Torture I was given special access to the BT Tower last week.

Freedom from Torture is a charity that works with torture survivors in the UK to help them rebuild their lives. They do gardens, allotments, cooking and creative writing and many other marvellous things that mean they make a real difference to people whose lives have been shattered and who, if we’re totally honest, no one else will help. So, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of John McCarthy we shimmied up the Tower. He was not there and, strictly speaking we didn’t shimmy up anything. But there were some excellent cupcakes and a raffle. I must say that Freedom From Torture do know how to show their supporters some love. And clearly they do some marvellous work.

You can find out more here, because I’m finding it quite hard to adopt my usual flippant tone and talk about them. OK?

Gentle reader, you will no doubt remember that while in Prague I took a comedy lift up to the top of the Zizkov Tower and took very similar photographs to the ones below. Although, the Prague photos do not have a ghostly London Eye appearing in them, so they are less fun I feel. I’ve decided I do like a trip up a telecommunications tower. Unfortunately, the BT Tower was not built in a communist country (no matter what the Daily Mail might tell you) and therefore does not have such paranoid mythology attached to it. It does however have a magnificent views of London. Much better than those on the London Eye. Mostly because the Tower is higher and half the view from the Eye is wasted on the suburbs of south London. No offense, Blackheath. OK maybe a bit.

The Tower was opened in 1966 by Tony Benn (hooray!) and Billy Butlin of the holiday camps, who opened a restaurant at the top. It was closed to the public in 1986 and as a consequence London is the only major city in the world not to have a revolving restaurant in the air. For shame! The Tower, despite being 189 metres tall, was officially a secret until the 1990s. It didn’t appear on any maps, you see. Kate Hoey confirmed its existence in 1993 invoking parliamentary privilege to do so. So, it seems MPs have long been using that to talk about trivial nonsense. Yes, Ryan Giggs I’m looking at you again. The BT Tower is a grade II listed building and the lifts travel at 7 metres per second which means that your ears pop on the way up. It is the only building in the UK that you can exit via the lift in the event of a fire evacuation. Act of Parliament says so.

We got a certificate to say that we had been up and an oversize booklet telling us all about the Tower which I haven’t read yet because, you know, Wikipedia. Here are some photographs. I am having a dispute of marital proportions with my camera at the moment so, on its behalf, I apologise for the quality. And can you believe it comes home drunk, smelling of fags and cheap perfume?

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