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.