Express Lifts
Tower
A
lighthouse slap bang in the centre of Britain, 70 miles from the
sea? Is East Anglia eroding that quickly that Northampton will
become a seaside town? Terry Wogan had plenty of fun lampooning
this structure on national radio and it quickly became
affectionately known as the Northampton Lighthouse.
It was built in 1980 by the Express
Lifts company as a testing tower for their lifts. The Queen
officially opened the tower in 1982.
Commissioned in 1978 by architect Maurice Walton of Stimpson and
Walton, the tower rose at a fast rate with the first 90 metres
being formed over three weeks of continuously poured concrete.
4,000 tons of concrete were poured to build this 418ft tower which
stands 14 ft higher than Salisbury cathedral. The base of the tower
is 48ft in diameter and tapers to 28ft at the top. It is the only
one in Britain and one of only two in Europe.
Inside it contains three shafts that were designed to test lifts at
22ft per second. Two internal staircases would get engineers to the
top glass observation tower.
The tower was granted "Grade 2 Listed" status 1997 for its
architectural interest to protect it from any adverse
re-developement proposals when the Express Lifts company sold out
to Otis Lifts and closed its doors in January of the same year.