Our Tallest Neighbour: Sutton Coldfield's Mast and the People Who Navigate by It

There is a moment, coming back into Sutton on the train from Birmingham, when the houses thin out, the light changes, and someone in the carriage glances up. You know the shape they are looking for. Red and white, ringed with aircraft lights, standing over the rooftops like a very patient neighbour who has never once been invited in.

The mast on the northern edge of town is not a secret. It is far too tall to be a secret. But it is the sort of landmark we file away under "background" — useful for giving directions, easy to ignore, occasionally blamed for a bad television signal. This is a small attempt to look at it properly for once.

A very postwar sort of landmark

The station went up in the late 1940s, when the country was still patching itself back together and television was a novelty rather than a fixture. The idea was straightforward: get a signal to the Midlands, and get it there properly. What arrived was a lattice mast of the sort that suddenly seemed to be appearing on horizons everywhere, held steady by a fan of guy wires and painted in the colours that say, politely but firmly, mind the aircraft.

From then on, the story of the mast is really the story of what we have all been watching. Black and white became colour. Two channels became four, then dozens, then a schedule you scroll rather than read. The aerial on the roof gave way to a dish, then to a box, then to a password. Through all of it, the mast kept doing its quiet job, with the occasional reshuffle of what it carries — the digital switchover, the later clearing of frequencies to make room for the mobile data we now use to watch things instead.

It has never been the tallest thing anyone has ever built, whatever the playground rumours of the 1980s claimed. But for a town of this size, having a structure of that scale on the doorstep is genuinely unusual, and it gives Sutton something most suburbs would love: a fixed point.

Where it turns up when you aren't looking

The best thing about a landmark this tall is how generous it is about being seen. You do not need a viewpoint, a car park or a café with a view. It simply appears.

• Walking in Sutton Park. Somewhere between the pools and the open heath it lifts above the treeline, and it is oddly calming — a reminder that you are still in Sutton, even when it feels like you are nowhere near it.
• Along the railway. Between Sutton Coldfield and Four Oaks, the mast has a habit of sliding past the window at exactly the wrong moment for a photograph.
• The northern edges of town. Around the lanes and footpaths up towards Hill Hook and the fields beyond, it stops being a background object and becomes the thing you steer by.
• Any hill on a clear day. Stand high enough, in the right sort of light, and you can pick it out from surprising distances — which is precisely why it makes such a good marker on the way home.
• A petrol station forecourt at dusk. Unromantic, admittedly, but the moment the red lights come on against a grey sky is one of the better free sights in town.

The myths, the grumbles and the red lights

Every landmark collects folklore, and this one has a decent haul. The most persistent is that it is (or was) the tallest mast in Europe, which is the sort of claim that grows a metre every time it is repeated. Then there is the belief that it interferes with everything — kettles, car keys, next door's boiler. Engineers tend to smile at this. Occasionally, if you live close by, there is a grain of truth in the aerial-related grumbles; mostly, it is just weather and old wiring.

The red lights have their own following. Over the years we have heard from readers who grew up thinking they were UFOs, readers who used them as a bedtime signal that the evening had properly begun, and at least one reader whose grandfather insisted the lights blinked in code. They do not, of course. They are there so aeroplanes can see what everyone else is trying not to look at.

And then there is the quieter myth, the one nobody says out loud but plenty of people half-believe: that if the mast ever went, something in town would feel wrong, the way a room feels wrong when a clock stops.

Why we keep looking up

There is a mundane explanation for all this affection, and it is worth saying plainly: the mast is useful. It gives you a bearing when you are turned around on a new estate. It tells a child on a long car journey that home is close. It is the thing you point at, slightly apologetically, when a visitor asks what there is to see in Sutton Coldfield — before you remember to mention the park instead.

But it is also a rare bit of genuine local distinctiveness. Shops change hands, roads get resurfaced, the high street reinvents itself every few years. The red and white lattice has simply been there, quietly transmitting, since long before most of us arrived and — barring the odd engineering project — for a good while after we have gone.

So next time you are unloading the shopping and the sky does that low, bright November thing, give it a proper look. Our tallest neighbour has been nodding at us for decades. It would be nice to nod back.