BT Tower is to be turned into a hotel | Hacker News Reader

BT Tower is to be turned into a hotel

ianvisits.co.uk

91 pointsbeardyw73 comments

Really fun fact about that building. When it was built it was a “list X” facility for UK national security which meant that although it was a massive building in the middle of Fitzrovia and visible virtually anywhere in London, it didn’t appear on maps and the government would officially deny its existence.

Rough, try getting directions to your hotel and nobody can tell you.

Yeah, I remember watching a documentary on it about 10 or so years ago, and even then they said it wasn’t signposted from anywhere and it was weirdly hard to find at street level.

It's not hard to find at street level, but the base is a fairly non-descript office building, so you might walk around it before it becomes obvious. There are signs. Mostly to tell you there is no access for the public.

Another fun fact - it had a rotating restaurant on the 34th floor called The Top of the Tower, which was operated by Butlins, and made one revolution every 23 minutes, but was closed in 1971 following a bombing[0]. Apparently there was talk of reopening the restaurant for the London Olympics in 2012 (not clear whether it would have rotated or not) but this didn't happen. Will be interesting to see if the hotel gets the rotating restaurant working again after all this time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_Tower

It would be great if it re-opened, they seem to be going out of fashion. The UK had three and now has zero!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolving_restaurants

Great list, but it seems it could be missing some entries.

The Hyatt Regency in downtown SF had a rotating restaurant (at one point called The Equinox?), but it no longer rotates and is no longer open to the public. It bled too much cash as people would go in and nurse a drink to get the full 360 view.

I had the privilege of attending an event in there while it was rotating a few years back. A real bucket list tick-off.

Fun fact #3

The Post Office Tower, as it was once called, was actually rebuilt after having been destroyed by a giant kitten in the early 1970s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ78rhjthQY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitten_Kong

A Butlins restaurant? Did you have to sing a song and get your meal served in a tent?

I once went to that restaurant in 2001 as a 12 year old kid who was invited to speak at a children's charity event held there.

It was a cool day out with a teacher from my school and couple of kids from a few years above. Afterwards, they took us on the London Eye as well, which was also pretty great.

Not the sort of thing that usually happens to kids in a state school in Yorkshire! I think I still have a "certificate" somewhere to say that I went to the top of the BT tower!

Nitpick, but "List X" means somewhere that holds classified material, not somewhere that doesn't appear on maps. In fact for many List X sites it would surely be a dead giveaway if there was a gap on maps where it ought to be!

According to Wikipedia and other sources [1], the BT tower was on maps (at least OS maps) anyway.

[1] https://londonist.com/london/history/a-brief-history-of-the-...

> In fact for many List X sites it would surely be a dead giveaway if there was a gap on maps where it ought to be!

Yep.

and for many years Soviet agents could easily find classified sites simply by looking for gaps on OS maps ( true story )

https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2185107/a-very-brit...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06b36q3

( I worked in mapping for decades and have some early OS maps with defence sites left blank )

I know an area that was just white space for most of the 19th, so it wasn't just to fool the Soviets, it was to fool the French too. Didn't get properly fixed until the 1933 map.

A big strip of empty paper surrounded by carefully shaded fields definitely stands out. It makes me wonder if the mapmakers could just about handle leaving data out, but couldn't countenance putting fake data in. Interestingly, the earliest OS 6" map has that area shaded as marsh, so at some point someone made a choice to leave it blank instead.

There's a fort nearby that's back by 1911, and disappears again for 1938. Guess it wasn't as obsolete as they thought it was.

Just for fun: the most boring grid square on current OS maps https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/81429

Definitely a black ops site, and don't let the photo convince you otherwise.

More seriously, as soon as satellite imagery or even to a lesser extent aerial photography or agents driving around with cameras were a thing, putting the secure site in with a really boring symbol like a landfill site or description like Ind Est would have been a much better disguise.

E.g. Menwith Hill

Yeah - I have an OS map that shows Longcross railway station apparently serving … empty countryside, but actually a large army R&D establishment (closed, now a film studio).

It also, IIRC has a special exemption in which unlike almost all buildings its elevators are for use in fires. In a typical building the notices tell you emphatically you should not use elevators if there's a fire, you should all use the stairs which are rated to handle the entire population of the building leaving in a timely fashion. But (if I'm thinking of the right tower) the BT Tower was specified so that the only effective way to evacuate the building during a fire is with elevators, for which purpose those elevators are rated differently.

"And no, it wasn’t a state secret until 1993 — otherwise it wouldn’t be in the map from the 1983 A-Z London."

I think the article has been updated. Or perhaps you mean further back in time?

Another fun fact - the orignal Goodies episode Kitten Kong featuring Twinkle the kitten taking down the BT | Post Office Tower is presumed lost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb59dEHRt5Q

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitten_Kong

At least there is still a very close edit extant.

https://360gigapixels.com/london-320-gigapixel-panorama/

Reminded me of this super high resolution panorama photo from it. I think it was a quite impressive achievement at the time (2012)

Not mentioned is the fact that the BT Tower was designed to be a node in the microwave backbone network. There are landmark towers across the country, though no others are also restaurants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Telecom_microwave_netw...

"For example, the Tower’s microwave aerials were removed more than a decade ago, as they were no longer needed to carry telecommunications traffic from London to the rest of the country."

It might not go into details, but it does mention it.

To me it's surprising they didn't keep them for backup / resiliency. There's a lot of rats and mice in London, and they can and do chew through fibre.

Cheaper to replace fiber during the day when most of the customers are out, than to hire a rare specialized technician to maintain it maybe

From memory at the time there was corrosion on the fixings and it would've been exceedingly expensive to repair/replace.

We don't do backup or resiliency anymore in search of "value for money"

Maintaining redundant fibre links (which exist) would likely be cheaper than maintaining a decades-old microwave system (I would wonder if they even have the appropriate spectrum licenses anymore, anyway).

I think it's just that the bandwidth of the microwaves is not much by today's standards. It was capable of 150,000 simultaneous telephone calls, which is something like 10Gbs. It may be that modern numbers were higher, but possibly not much as you have to share the microwave spectrum with other uses. In a fibre you get the whole optical spectrum to yourself, so you can achieve much higher speeds. You can also run many fibres in the same ducting and increase bandwidth that way.

For backup / resiliency you just run more fibres via different routes.

Fitzrovia is laced with fibre; the entire area is/was host to a large number of broadcast service providers, media companies, telcos, etc.

Running out of fibre is not likely in that part of London.

I wonder how many of them were originally set up there because of proximity to the tower and its communications links. Other than that, isn't Fitzrovia basically UCL and early 20th century novelists? Although I suppose there is Broadcasting House over on the other side.

Most of them were along the ECML and WCML, you could see them in several spots from a train ride.

They were not big enough to contain a restaurant, just two big dishes on top of a pole, on top of a hill.

Revolving restaurants! It's a fantastic place to eat, the sad thing has been that BT just couldn't exploit the value of it in terms of corporate entertainment. I think it'll be lovely for people to be able to have a meal up there.

I've not plotted it myself, but I'm told that if you plot the links to other main microwave nodes, and then look at embassies from foreign nations....

Did HM government allow the foreign nations to choose the individual locations of their embassies?

I feel like my memory (and that article) aren’t very clear on this, but Backbone in spirit felt quite different to the series of high bandwidth towers of which Telecom Tower was one part.

Regular lets-call-grandma telecommunications would be handled by your well know, friendly, cuddly round towers like Telecom Tower and Stokenchurch just next to the Chiltern cutting on the M40.

Sinister everyone-has-died communications would be handled by the mysterious, dangerous looking towers like Highgate and Kelvedon Hatch. These towers resemble high tension power lines and growl at you if you look at them for too long.

This site has a lot more detail on how the two ended up as one, over the years:

https://www.subbrit.org.uk/features/backbone-microwave-relay...

Look at Life - Eating high, 1966 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMPXmnK8G8E

British Pathé - Top Of The Tower Aka GPO Tower (1967) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bi2_3gljm4

A breath taking view of the Horizon. Spin in the restaurant as the Postmaster general spins in his grave at what the Post Office has become.

Thats really funny, the British going to all that effort to make a fancy restaurant in the sky, and then getting dressed up in a suit and looking sharp, and then sitting down to ... a big plate of chips.

I miss London!

Lots of odd changes going on in cities right now. Offices being converted to hotels and flats in an attempt to return to profitability.

Retail spaces are being turned into "experiences" with climbing walls, gyms and golf ranges taking over.

Upside is our office rent is now super cheap but I don't know who's footing the bill for all that property.

I also doubt the climbing walls are as profitable per-square-foot.

> I don't know who's footing the bill for all that property.

The landlord, for now, until debt matures.

Then, the banks^Wtaxpayer.

> right now.

Total retail space in many countries (notably in the US, but elsewhere, too) has been ramping down for a decade or so. Frankly there's far too much of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail_apocalypse

Considering the Internet, it is too much. But a lot of the real estate we see today was built or approved before, well, Amazon became what it is.

Oh, sure, but that's just how things go. Things change, certain facilities become useless and are either demolished or repurposed. Practically every coastal city in the world has or had some sort of redundant pre-containerisation port facility, say; often it will have been demolished and built on in the 80s or 90s (after containerisation, ports got _way_ smaller).

In this case it seems that the tower is no longer useful as telecommunications hub so BT decided to get rid of it.

There are not many options for such a structure, which cannot be destroyed as it is listed.

The BT Tower is also known as the Post Office Tower. It used to be the tallest building in London.

The reason it’s round is so that it would withstand a nuclear attack blast wave, if London was ever attacked.

> would withstand a nuclear attack blast wave,

I can't imagine round vs square makes more than a marginal impact on shock wave resistance...

If quora [1] is to be believed, your imagination has failed you by a drag factor of 50%.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Do-curved-surfaces-have-an-aerodynamic...

And it has a rotating restaurant such that it would generate electricity due to the wind caused by the nuclear blast due to Magnus effect.

I ate in that tower, before the Goodies kitten destroyed it. And, watched Concorde flying over london the same holiday.

Glad to see there’s still some common sense on that side of the pond. Meanwhile, in Dearborn, Michigan they decided to tear down a 670,000 Sq. Ft. office building which was previously used by Ford.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2023/11/16/former...

Just like that. American-style Capitalism is nauseatingly profligate and wasteful.

This could be a cultural loss. Aren’t some floors essentially museums, with much older equipment intact?

It would be a shame if they closed the access to the pool of equipment to the public. But then again I would guess that a museum inside a hotel is not contradictory.

There's general public access to somewhere in the BT Tower? Do you have more info on that?

It opens once a year to the public. This is from last year https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/tickets-alert-tours-of-...

Where's Tom Scott when you need him :)

Taking a much earned break. I'm hoping he'll be back soon with the odd video now and then, but I can't fault him for stepping back after all this time and enjoying all that youtube money

It was built in the 60s. Hell, my dad was alive when it was built. That's hardly historic!

Historic doesnt always mean old.

I always heard it closed due to the threat of terrorism...

The 1971 closure was due to a bomb, yes. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/31/...

It sometimes feels like London is a theme-park designed to separate people from their money and entertain the Plebs workforce.

This (and the giant Ferris wheel) certainly don't help.

Sounds better than a city full of shops designed to separate people from their money buying stuff they don’t need.

Life is about building memories, connecting with people and sharing experiences. Having a variety of places to do that (update: including shops) is nice in my opinion.

> Sounds better than a city full of shops designed to separate people from their money buying stuff they don’t need.

London has plenty of those.

> London has plenty of those.

If you want American candy, sure.

(To American HNers: this isn't a joke about you. Or even really that much of a joke, alas)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/04/us-swe...

We have these in Ireland, too. Always vaguely assumed they were a money laundering thing; never anyone in them, really.

Various hypotheses. Money laundering, VAT scamming, tax abuse, or just outrageous profiteering based on never being around when the bill for VAT or business rates come due.

There is one famous, very real, very popular American candy store in London -- Kingdom Of Sweets -- which is absolutely legit and has been trading for twenty years, having started elsewhere. It was famous in British geek culture for being where you bought all the sweets you heard US geeks talking about on Foothills and Surfers and the like.

And then there's a couple of likely legit competitors, and then... a whole layer of fakery, fraud and shell companies.

CyberCandy was legit and famous and existed for a looong time, but shut down in 2016 :(

London also has a lot of fantastic free parks, museums, galleries, libraries. So I'm not sure I understand your criticism.

Eh? This is a giant microwave telecom tower. They're all over the world (find a large city that doesn't have a convenient nearby hill, and there are probably one or two) and they're ~all disused. Fibre made them essentially useless decades ago, and the London one doesn't even have its antennae anymore.

It's presumably listed, so they can't just demolish it. What do you _want_ them to do with it, if not this?

It can't be disputed that (central) London is one of the world's biggest tourist attractions, and much of it is geared towards activities. But it's far from the only factor to life in a city that's larger, more diverse, and more distinctive than ever. It's one of the most varied places in the entire world when it comes to demography, wealth, cultures, and opportunities – is this a bad thing?

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