This looks like it belongs on a set of a budget sci-fi movie. So bland, neither elegance nor character.

Allow me to quote to you from a Punch article by E. V. Knox written in about 1930 (collected in "Things That Annoy Me" of 1932):

  The Pylons
  (Being the transcript of an unwritten radiologue, dated A.D. 2129)
  
  Once again we are threatened with a historical calamity. It is proposed to uproot the graceful pylons which adorn the line of the Sussex Downs and are the sole relics of the electricity cable which carried light and power to our forefathers along the Southern Coasts...

Plus ça change...

Does this exist online? When I searched I only found physical copies

I don't think so. He died in 1971 so it's still in copyright though I doubt anyone would care much. I don't know exactly which volume of punch the original article is taken from, and it's possible that that's up there somewhere.

Oh, and I just double checked and my copy was published in 1930; the second edition was 1932. So quite likely the original article was in one of the 1929/1930 run.

Aesthetics of public installations has sharply declined since its heyday in the 19th century, so he was probably right.

It's for labor savings, not aesthetics.

> So bland, neither elegance nor character

Curious, I feel the exact opposite.

I remember the competition that spawned these - they were, by far, my favoured option.. although the idea of wireframe giant humans and ants oVer the countryside was 'interesting'! :

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2011/sep/14/...

I agree the others are even worse than this, but all of them really are terrible, did 5th graders make these?

Oval's is bleak. Looks like anti-tank caltrops strung together with barbed wire.

not sure "making in pretty" and giving in a UI refresh every 5 weeks when the latest version of whatever js framework is released is really in the budget.

Christ, seriously? I assumed they'd henceforth be underground everywhere - in Dorset some (Milliken) are being replaced with underground cabling, after a petition based on countryside views I believe, but it benefits/doesn't disrupt farmers' fields & future developments too. Presumably once you have that sort of underground trunking it's easier to add other utilities too (even if they don't share any hardware/boring, there's still the planning and mapping etc.).

Non-superconducting electrical transmission lines don't want to be buried, it's really expensive and harder to handle/deal with when stuff breaks. You also can't have forest on top of it.

One can hope we get by with the current approach until superconducting lines have been sufficiently figured out (it seems they don't need to run the voltage as high due to current being somewhat easier to deal with than voltage and losses not depending (significantly) on actual current (so thicker cables don't loose as much of their current rating to thermal limits than with traditional cooper/aluminum)).

Underground utilities are usually significantly more expensive to construct. That's why overhead power lines are so common.

The installation cost is tends to be so much higher that the potentially lower maintenance costs due to less weather damage doesn't make underground lines lower cost in the two to five decade maturities of utility bonds used for financing.