The Tinshill BT Tower (also known locally as Cookridge Tower, or Tinshall BT Radio Station) is a 60.96 metres ( 200 ft) tall telecommunication tower located on the east side of Otley Old Road in the north of

Leeds Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by populati ...

West Yorkshire West Yorkshire is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. It is an inland and upland county having eastward-draining valleys while taking in the moors of the Pennines. West Yorkshire came into exi ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. It is in an elevated part of Leeds, with its base 192 metres above sea level. It is one of fourteen BT towers built of reinforced concrete. The tower is 53 metres tall and consists of a steel lattice tower on top of a concrete base. It was built in 1951 as part of chain of stations relaying television between Telephone House in Manchester and Kirk O'Shotts in Scotland, part of the

British Telecom microwave network The British Telecom microwave network was a network of point-to-point microwave radio links in the United Kingdom, operated at first by the General Post Office, and subsequently by its successor BT plc. From the late 1950s to the 1980s it provided ...

. In 2002 it had 16 large microwave dishes providing point-to-point communications, and roughly 50 other small microwave dishes, mobile phone,

paging In computer operating systems, memory paging is a memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage for use in main memory. In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage ...

and

TETRA Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA; formerly known as Trans-European Trunked Radio), a European standard for a trunked radio system, is a professional mobile radio and two-way transceiver specification. TETRA was specifically designed for use by go ...

transmitters. The BT dishes were 3 and 3.7 metres diameter and mostly transmitted on 11

GHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one he ...

. In 2002, prompted by a request from the local MP, Harold Best, it was the subject of a study by the

Health Protection Agency The Health Protection Agency (HPA) was a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom. It was an organisation that was set up by the UK government in 2003 to protect the public from threats to their health from infectious diseases and envi ...

, who concluded that the radio emissions from its various transmitters, were well below levels which might cause a risk to health for people nearby.Health Protection Agency
NRPB-W23: Non-technical summary. Retrieved 21 June 2009.

References

{{BT Group Buildings and structures in Leeds British Telecom buildings and structures Transmitter sites in England

See also

References