CPRE Shropshire
Protecting Shropshire

Home

News

Campaigns & Issues

Events & Debates

Support CPRE

About CPRE Shropshire

Search CPRE

CPRE Oswestry

CPRE West Midlands

CPRE National Website

Sign up for our National Campaigns Update

Join CPRE or donate

CPRE strongly opposes overhead power lines in areas of high landscape value, especially within the South Shropshire Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Future lines should be constructed underground and existing lines that intrude should be buried as soon as practical. If you feel a line should be dismantled and rerouted underground please let us know.

Legacy to Oswestry Line

CPRE Shropshire has welcomed the Shropshire Council's decision to object to the proposal by Scottish Power Energy Networks to erect an overhead power line between Oswestry and Legacy. This line cuts through an area of significant landscape value adjacent to a World Heritage Site, and CPRE believes that it should be buried underground. On 8 July 2009, the council's North Area Regulatory Committee (Oswestry) resolved to formally object to the proposal and to advise the Secretary of State:

That the Council believes that an overhead line would be damaging to a landscape of important ecological and amenity value, and that the Council urges that the supply be placed underground. CPRE's Oswestry branch has strongly opposed the line since it was first proposed and will lobby the Secretary of State and attend any inquiry to ensure that this line is buried underground.

Mike Bullen Chairman of CPRE Oswestry says "This is a very good decision which will help prevent an intrusive power line being built across some of Shropshire's most important landscapes. The line will be within sight of the newly declared Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal World Heritage site and must be buried underground. We will be lobbying the Secretary of State and any public inquiry to ensure pylons are not erected across this attractive landscape."

Further Information

• 9 July "Overhead line lobby pledge" (Shropshire Star)
• 9 July. "Electricity line bid protest growing" (Shropshire Star)

Bill Bryson on Wirescapes

Bill Bryson, President of CPRE, spoke about power lines in his presidential address to CPRE in 2007.

"To me, marching ranks of pylons are way too common in the countryside, and inexcusably alien and ugly. Too often when you go into the country you end up feeling as if you have wandered onto a set from War of the Worlds.

In 1986, at the time the electricity companies were being privatized, The Economist magazine calculated that if all the electricity generating companies were required to devote one half of one percent of their turnover to burying overhead cables, we would be able to bury 1000 miles of them every year. There are 8,000 miles of high-voltage power lines in this country, so they would all be buried now. Instead they seem to be a part of nearly every rural scene, nearly always running along hilltops and ridge lines where they ruin views in both directions. Other countries make electricity companies paint their pylons dark green or otherwise lose them against the background.

I don't understand why National Grid, the company responsible for erecting pylons, is allowed such freedom. We don't put motorways on the tops of hills. We don't run natural gas pipelines overhead. Why should power lines be permitted to go wherever it suits the distributing company o put them?

At a minimum there should be a presumption against allowing pylons within sight of World Heritage sites, national parks or areas of outstanding natural beauty. But really they should just be taken away. I don't pretend to understand the economics of electricity distribution, but I do know that Denmark buries 18 percent of its high voltage cables while Britain manages just 6 percent."