If you live in the area you can’t have missed it. It looks like a mini Post office Tower perched on the hill near to where the road splits towards Wotton-under-Edge and Dursley.
The tower is 250 ft tall and made from reinforced concrete. The reason it’s made of concrete rather than a more conventional steel lattice is one of aesthetics as it needed approval from the Royal Fine Arts Commission due to its location.
Obviously there’s no restaurant at the top of the tower like the BT tower in London used to have and the entrance isn’t very glamorous either. The door at the foot of the tower in the photo below looks more like an airlock!
It’s changed over the years, mostly it looks like communication isn’t its strong point any longer as all the dishes and aerials have been removed. There’s more of those on the TV transmitter across the road!
An Update in March 2026
According to a YouTube channel called Ringway Manchester this tower formed part of a UK nuclear defense communication network during the Cold War called Backbone.
The info is in a declassified 1955 white paper.
Backbone was a network of line of site microwave communications towers spaced about 25 to 35 miles apart. Microwave links were considered more resilient against nuclear attack than other methods at the time.
The Ringway Manchester video has a map that shows the tower at Wotton-under-Edge as being in communication with towers at Fiveways to the south and Sparsholt Firs to the east.
There were a few variations of the Backbone network and the Wotton tower appears in one of the later ones as the network grew from an original 14 locations. This tower isn’t shown as part of the original Backbone.
The idea of Backbone was to keep communications away from big cities as those places would be vulnerable to attack. Communications cables aren’t very resilient and could be easily damaged. Microwave links on towers out in the country bypass cities and are more difficult to damage.
From some research I’ve done, the military aspect was probably more of a secondary role due to cost but no doubt it would have played its part.
An extract from an old government inspectors report on the Wotton site says the following:
The station must also be located where the radio routes can be extended to London by means of a route to the east using existing radio stations.” He later added “the primary need for a radio station near Wotton-under-Edge is to maintain essential defence telephone and telegraph communications”.
Have a look at the link below which is where I took the above from.
The fact it’s made of reinforced concrete has nothing to do with making it blast proof but rather one of being more visually appealing for this location than a conventional radio tower would be.
These concrete ones would appear to be bit of a rarity.
For a deep dive into project Backbone have a look at this link Subbrit.org.uk (opens in a new tab). It has a big section towards the end about the BT tower at Wotton.
High frequency radio signals used with microwave links travel in straight lines rather than follow the curvature of the earth so they need to be line of site communications.
Most of the communications traffic from these towers are now carried over fiber optic links.
Of possible concern are the future plans to move all radio and TV transmissions away from conventional transmitters to streaming Internet services. At that point all the TV and radio transmitters will be decommissioned.
The Internet was designed to be resilient but it does need thousands of little green boxes all over the country linking everything together so it won’t take much to break large sections of it.
Good old fashioned radio transmitters with back up generators are going to be far more reliable in the event of a national disaster if we haven’t switched them all off.
The photos below show how it used to look. I’m not sure of the date but I probably took them in the 90s. As you can see, it had a lot of antennas on it back then! I scanned the images from some old slides so they’re not brilliant.
The approach road from the A4135 has some great views looking down the valley into Wotton.
Access to it is easy, take the road to Ozleworth Park and the road splits to go either side of it. If you’re into towers such as this it’s worth a look. If it’s no longer used for anything critical it might get pulled down.
if you have any other info on the tower feel free to contact me.
I’ve put a video of it on the Stroudie Central YouTube channel. I will make an updated video as I’ve since found a lot more information along with old photos.
Related Books
War Plan UK
War Plan UK is the result of more than five years’ research into the real face of British civil defence. Duncan Campbell reveals the incredible history of how one government after another has planned to protect itself and survive.
This is a re-issue of the original 1983 book by Duncan Campbell.
£15
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