I've always had a strong affection for the Traditional British Pylon; it's a design classic on a truly gargantuan scale. How I love these benign skeletal behemoths that bestrides our Green & Pleasant Countryside truly bringing power to the people. Hell, we even used one on the back cover of our (ahem) new album, to acknowlege that all Folklore emerges from our interaction with landscape and enviroment in terms of a more integrated sense of Tradition, Community and available Technology. Thus the pylon is iconic to our culture, an unchanging feature as perfect as our beloved trees, castles, churches, stone circles, ley lines, wind mills and telegraph poles. Now, it seems, in a stunning piece of post-post-modern propagandising, they're suddenly considered 'dated', and new designs have been called for. See them here:

Shortlisted designs for a new generation of electricity pylons - in pictures

Must our precious and ancient pylons go the way of our pillar boxes, phone boxes, and other lost treasures of our traditional urban & rural landscapes? Do any of these sci-fi monstronsities truly pass muster in an age where, quite franky, there are more important things to worry about? The true beauty of the Traditional Pylon is that by its very ubiquity we can ignore it; they are, in effect, invisible by their familiarity, and if we must persist with an overground national grid (see HERE for the feasibility of undergrounding high power cables) then the last thing we want is drawn attention to the bloody things. Heavens, our landscapes are blighted enough by these wretched & woeful wind-turbines (whose sole purpose would seem to wave in a new generation of nuclear power by proving that renewable energy is inefficient!) without inflicting further sculptural horrors upon it.