This might as well keep company with the other Area 51 discussions.

Moved from Astronomy to Conspiracy Theories.

If you think that the US goverment denying the existance of Area 51 and keeping it off maps and such is silly then wait until you see what the British goverment has done.

The BT Tower (aka London Telecom Tower, aka the Post Office Tower) in London was finished in 1964, it is a 188m tall (tallest building in Britain up to 1981) very distinctive tower visable from most of the city, and since 1966 open to the public with a giftshop and up to 1980 a rotating restaurant at the top. Until the mid 90s (when its existance was officially confirmed by an MP) its existance was officially a secret and anyone taking a photograph of it was breaking the official secrets act (inspite of this it was regularly shown in television shows). Which makes keeping the existance of an airbase in the middle of nowhere seem a lot less silly in comparison.

The existence of the tower wasnty a secret at all. Until British Telecom was split away from the Post Office and privatised it was Crown Property and not subject to the same regs and laws as comemrcial property. Also some of the communications equipment on it are Govt property. But to say it wasnt on any maps isn't true, I have a London A to Z street atlas from 1978 and its certainly marked on there I have also ones from 1987 and 1994 and its on all of them.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

You may be thinking of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_House

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MI6_Building

Which I seem to remember being "admitted to" some years back....

Cheers
John

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The engineer's mantra :-
The glass is neither half full or half empty, it's twice as big as it needs to be....

I am getting the infromation from both a recent program on Discovery Channel ("Industrial Revelations: Best of British" IIRC) and the Wikipedia article on it (fourth paragraph down of that section, assuming no edits since I posted this). If you have sources that say otherwise I would be interested to see them before I make myself look foolish to anyone else (captain swoop have you got a scanner or digital camera so you can post the relevent page from the A-Z?).

http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.c...multimap.y=253

Here's an extract of the OS map for the bit of London with the BT tower...

http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.c...multimap.y=228

And the A-Z. It's there now...

And Kate Hoey MP certainly said it

http://www.parliament.the-stationery.../Debate-5.html

From Hansard, the record of parliment in the UK. See column 634.

The official secrets act is a wonderful blanket piece of legislation, that can cover things very easily. I'm suspecting the tower got included as it would have potentially carried sensitive communications.

Cheers
John

__________________
The engineer's mantra :-
The glass is neither half full or half empty, it's twice as big as it needs to be....

We need all these area 51 threads merged. I'm running out of cheap shots against folks wasting time with half melted drones and the like.