Psst, hey!
I’m going to let you in on a little secret, but you can’t tell anybody, okay?
I would be ruined if this got out.
So you know those segments at the end of my videos?
The ones where I express my support for a product or service?
Well there’s actually a bit of a… conflict of interest: these companies have been bribing
me to endorse them.
Wait, what was that?
You already knew that?
I haven’t been doing a good job at keeping that a secret?
Well at least it’s a better-kept secret than this place: the BT Tower.
You see, the BT Tower is an iconic part of London’s skyline, and a major tourist attraction—since
the day it opened in 1964, it’s been visited by millions of people, operated a rotating
restaurant, and even maintained the title of tallest building in London for nearly 16
years.
So why am I making a video about it?
Well, it’s not because I’ve run out of content; that’s going to happen in about
four months.
I’m making this video because the BT Tower—in all of its shiny, rotating glory—was technically
classified as a secret location under UK law for decades.
Now at this point, you’re probably saying, “Wait, what?
How was a tourist attraction a secret location?”
And, well, obviously that’s what I was building to, so shush.
In the 1960s, the UK was facing two mounting pressures: the first was the Cold War, and
the second was a dangerous scarcity of ugly-looking towers covered in microwave dishes.
In a stroke of total genius, the General Post Office devised a solution that could address
both problems at once.
Specifically, the UK needed to design a new communications network that would stand up
to a nuclear attack, because the UK’s existing modes of long-distance communication—namely
coaxial cables and yelling at mummy—just wouldn’t cut it.
The original plan was to build a “skeleton cable network,” which would feature around-the-clock
coverage of all things skelet—wait, sorry, wrong skeleton cable network.
This skeleton cable network would reinforce the UK’s existing cable network with a series
of extra nodes that would bypass major cities like London, Manchester, and Birmingham by
between 30 and 60 miles.
This would mean that if the Soviets had nuked London, the data could reroute through the
backup network outside of London, and everybody who wasn’t just sent to whatever the British
version of heaven is could watch live footage of their own imminent demise, completely uninterrupted.
But seeing as this backup cable system was a complex infrastructure project that would
take years to implement—and still wouldn’t be entirely reliable when completed—they
decided to speed things up by also doing another complex infrastructure project: a supplementary
network called “Backbone.”
Instead of building this Backbone network out of coaxial cables—which could be severed
by a nuclear explosion or a single Capitalist-hating mouse—they decided on a radio network instead.
This system would stretch from south-east England to Scotland, using microwave radio
towers to transmit both civilian and military data up and down the UK.
Now, if you remember the BT Tower from all the way back 2 minutes ago, it just so happened
to be one of the major towers in this brand-new half-television/half-military-secrets communications
network, and as such, it was designated a “secret location” under the Official Secrets
Act of 1911.
This meant that its address was not considered public information, and disseminating information
about it was technically illegal.
But unlike the UK’s better-kept secrets—like Hugh Laurie being British or Australia 2—the
BT Tower couldn’t be easily kept under wraps.
Because it needed line of sight on the other radio towers at all times, it couldn’t risk
being blocked by any other local buildings or extremely-tall Soviet spies, so just to
be safe, they made it the tallest thing in London.
Of course, convincing everyone to pretend like something they see every day simply doesn’t
exist is impossible if you aren’t my middle-school bully, so the laws around the BT tower’s
secrecy were generally pretty lax.
But while you weren’t going to go to jail for typing its address into Google Maps—or
since it was the 60s, I don’t know, Ye Olde Google Maps—that doesn’t mean that its
secret status was completely unenforceable.
In 1978, for example, a journalist was tried and convicted under the Official Secrets Act
for collecting information about similar locations, and the judge ruled that any secret location—including
the BT Tower—could not be legally named; instead, the BT Tower was given the affectionate
pet name “Location 23.”
So, am I finally going to go to jail?
Is this finally the end of Half as Interesting?
Well, sorry to disappoint, but I’m not about to let some tiny island nation out in the
middle of the Atlantic stop me from retrofitting Wikipedia articles with bad jokes for money.
And besides, the BT Tower was ceremoniously declassified in 1993 when MP Kate Hoey invoked
parliamentary privilege to confirm its existence and address, so I can talk about it all I
want.
It’s all public information now.
I can even tell you about the insane experiments they’re conducting in the baseme—
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