Electricity pylon fan turns metallic monsters marching over Yorkshire into quirky calendar

Nearly 60 years on the grid is undergoing a massive overhaul to transport electricity from where it is increasingly produced – in the world’s biggest wind farms off Yorkshire.

The prospect of more pylons has antagonised campaigners - but the spindly-legged giants do have their fans.

Step forward Stuart Atkinson who has found pylons an unlikely side hustle, turning an interest he’s had since he was a child into a calendar - 2025’s edition featuring a few from Yorkshire.

Stuart, from Manchester, works for a hazardous waste company that takes him all over the country, giving him plenty of opportunities to admire the massive structures.

He said: “I’ve always had a bit of an interest in pylons – I guess because they are so imposing and incongruous with the landscape, sort of like metallic monsters marching across the hills and fields.

“I think I’ll blame my first contact with them on the animated movie Watership Down. There’s a scene there that shows a view right up the centre of a pylon that struck me as interesting at the time.

“I do remember taking photos of the large pylon just outside school as a teenager so I guess that is when it started.”

He says with a bit of help from the Pylon Appreciation Society - surprisingly two Facebook groups have well over 7,000 members with regular daily posts from around the world - and quite a bit of his own research, he put together his first calendar in a few months over the summer of 2023.

Initially he wanted to find images of pylons standing next to interesting features - he’d found one next to a drive-thru Greggs - a UK first. The second one was next to a dinosaur in a golf park - but he couldn’t find a third.

“I don’t claim to be the originator of the idea of a quirky calendar - after all, there have been the ‘Views of the M40’ calendar, ‘Car Parks of Britain’, ‘Crap Towns’ etc - but I believe this is the first one dedicated to the brutal aesthetic of electricity transmission towers, or pylons as they are commonly known.

“I think the British love that sort of inane detail and like to celebrate the odd and the specific.”

He had visions of tipping his first batch into the recycling bin in January, but to his surprise it not only sold well but sparked interest from a major distributor.

The 2025 calendar features pylons on Blackstone Edge in the Pennines on the border of Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire. September features one at Birstall in Kirklees, while November’s captures the Lindley line crossing the Ferrybridge-Rochdale line at Ainley Top, off junction 24 of the M62.

He admits a lot of pylons - the standard L2, L6 and L12 - look the same.

But “sometimes you get one with multiple circuits, maybe coming in from a few directions; or a tower with a sharp deviation in the cable line.”

If people want to find the calendar they can just search ‘pylons calendar’ or visit the website taketheaframe.co.uk.