Lower Lea Valley

I visited the Lower Lea Valley. There is a network of electric pylons that is situated in this networked industrial valley. I found a bit of writing about the history the area and the transmission network.

The Lower Lea Valley has been a local centre for industry since the Middle Ages, when water mills were concentrated along the Bow Back Rivers. The canalisation of the rivers and the drainage of the marshes in the 19th and early 20th centuries, coupled with cheap rents, the arrival of the railways and strict laws against undertaking noxious industries in the city, attracted manufacturing to the Lower Lea Valley. In recent years, the railway marshalling yards have closed, as have many of the factories. The larger manufacturing companies moved even further east, replaced by trading estates, and in Hackney Wick, an artists’ community forced out of eastern central London by high rents.

(…)So it is helpful to think about electricity pylons and the transmission network in the Lower Lea Valley as being situated within the framework of a networked industrial landscape, a
composition of discrete sites bound together by political and economic intention, and by use (Worth 2005), integrated with other electricity supply networks (the basis on which the
National Grid, established in stages in 1927-35 as a series of connected regional transmission networks, was set up). The transmission network is part of a larger national and international network of power stations, fed by coal, gas and nuclear fission, providing electricity to homes and industry across the United Kingdom and Europe, linking disparate
places and fuel extraction industries across a networked industrial landscape, and with other networks in the Lower Lea Valley, such as the railways, waterways and roads.

When the electricity pylons in the Lower Lea Valley were constructed in the early 1950s, there were few regulations governing their placement in the landscape. The route taken by
the transmission network was governed by reasons of economy and common sense. The most economical way to construct an overhead power line is in a straight line; less steel is
therefore used in the manufacture of conductors (the cables which carry the electrical current) and pylons (the deviation towers, which are constructed where a power line changes
direction; these have a larger footprint to counter the stress placed on the structure, and use a greater quantity of steel). The first overhead power line in the Lower Lea Valley initially
passed solely along the railway lines and marshalling yards, and crossed areas occupied by factories. It avoided town centre of Stratford and the open ground of Hackney Marshes,
which had been drained and opened to the public in 1893 as a recreation ground.
Emma Dwyer,World Archaeological Congress, Dublin, July 2008
Method and the Machine: theorising an archaeological approach to technical processes
Museum of London Archaeology Service