Pylon Pastoral

Pylon Pastoral is a photographic installation in the form of a scroll following the forty-eight electric pylons along a 14km route from Shoreham Power Station, a gas-fired station located on the South Coast of England, through the landscape of the Sussex Downs to the Bolney National Grid Substation (an important strategic asset in the UK energy system).

It’s more than 140 years since the British public first had electricity in their homes, and almost a century since the National Grid was launched. From the late 1920s onwards the infrastructure of the UK’s vast National Grid network, and more especially the transmission tower, or pylon, was a new and unfamiliar presence in the landscape. It was also a divisive presence.

Initially borrowed from Greek by French Egyptologists as a term for the gateway towers of Egyptian temples, the word pylon (which simply means “gate”) reflected both their appearance, and the idea that they would provide a ‘gateway’ to a reliable electricity supply for the UK.

Today, new battlegrounds are arising around the logistics of electrification, not least the planned expansions of the national grid infrastructure to enable the connection and transmission of clean energy. To achieve the target of decarbonising Britain’s power network by 2035 the National Grid estimates that, over the next seven years, five times as many transmission lines – via overhead pylons or (a more expensive option) underground cables – will need to be built than in the past three decades combined. Pylons therefore look set to be an even bigger part of our industrial furniture, requiring an environmentalist perspective that promotes building and in many cases across some of the country’s most picturesque landscapes.

The title, Pylon Pastoral, makes reference to the poem by the conservative poet Edward Meyerstein (1889-1952) who describes the pylon as “That carrier of life-imperilling light, That skeleton to mar the lovely sight”.