There is plenty to appreciate about these lattice-work leviathans, but the National Grid is bowing to pressure to bury them instead
Encase your legs in nylons, Bestride your hills with pylons, O age without a soul, moaned John Betjeman in 1966, railing against the twin evils of the modern age as he saw them: tights and electricity transmission towers.
While the Campaign to Protect Rural England might not share his distaste for synthetic stockings, it has kept alive his fight against the hated pylon, exerting a level of pressure that has finally seen the National Grid cave in. This week it announced that it will spend half a billion pounds on burying the biggest and ugliest of the countrys pylon network paid for by a rise in electricity bills.