The photo published with your article (‘There’ll be no countryside left’: Opposition to pylons puts UK carbon targets at risk, 3 August) shows a row of traditional lattice tower pylons. These types of pylons are used all over the UK and generally regarded as ugly by many people, especially if they live near them.
However, in 2011, the Danish company Bystrup won a competition to design a pylon for the UK that would blend more inconspicuously into the landscape. Its T-pylon consists of just a vertical pole with two horizontal arms extending from each side from the top. It is a third shorter than the lattice design, with a smaller footprint, and 36 have already been installed in Somerset.
If this type of pylon could be used where new ones are required, perhaps it would result in less opposition? The installed T-pylons are white – but maybe a suitable green colour might make them even less obtrusive. And, as we will require so many of them, hopefully they can be made in the UK.
John Dinneen
Cambridge
• Re your article on pylons, there is nothing “unspoilt” about the landscape of the Amber Valley, or anywhere else in England for that matter. The Amber Valley is a former coal mining area, and you don’t have look very hard to still see signs of it today; they give the area its unique character.
The next valley along is a Unesco world heritage site on account of its many 18th- and 19th-century cotton mills. Elsewhere in this green and pleasant land, canals, abandoned railways and reservoirs are some of our best-loved landscape features, and relics of our industrial past. From the lime kilns of the Yorkshire Dales to the tin mines of Cornwall, the signs are everywhere: ours is an industrial landscape.
The sooner we start seeing that, the sooner we’ll appreciate that pylons not only belong in these places, but might one day be the very reason people visit.
Holly Nicholson
Sheffield
• I love seeing pylons (Letters, 6 July). Observing that they always carry conductors in groups of three reminds me that our grid carries alternating current in three phases – one of the most wonderful bits of engineering design underpinned by a beautiful trigonometric identity.
This means that electric power can be transmitted over long distances with very little loss and without the need for neutral wires to carry current back to power stations (halving the wire needed). They are truly wondrous.
Matt Atkinson
Southampton
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