For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
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By Sir Morley Steven
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1868326
Try to discuss this monumental ( monument and mental) waste of money without getting donked!
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By Paul_Sengupta
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1868336
I might go up to London and some point and climb it.

I might even buy a sandwich while I'm there, so it fulfils the mission of being there to attract people and their spending. I might even have a pint if I stay late.
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By kanga
#1868395
VRB_20kt wrote:It’s London innit. Home of excessive spending on ostentatious projects.


.. specifically, it's in the bailiwick of Westminster City Council, which some with long and nerdish political memories :oops: might say reinforces that tradition :wink:
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By eltonioni
#1868517
rf3flyer wrote:Is it a landfill?

It's a kind of reverse landfill. Up here, mounds such as that, were known as slag heaps.
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By kanga
#1868551
Rob P wrote:Wasn't something similar proposed for Templehof Airfield?

..


There was a precedent in West Berlin. Soon after the Potsdam agreement dividing the city into 4 Sectors, the Military Governors and new Berliner Mayor of the 3 Western Sectors (France, UK, US) agreed that the rubble clearance needed to allow rebuilding would be best done 'wholesale'. All the rubble was trucked into the middle of an open park in the British Sector, and accumulated. The resulting pile became known as 'Teufefsberg' (the "Devil's Mountain"). It was so high that its top was (just) in line-of sight to the nearest bit of West Germany, enabling higher datarate wireless communications invulnerable to Soviet cable-cutting. The peak soon acquired an array of 'interesting' antennae, looking both West and East, which were in turn soon covered by radomes; within a joint UK/US military base; perhaps unsurprisingly, there has been more publicity (and fiction!) about the US involvement than the British :) . When the Warsaw Pact collapsed it was soon abandoned, and is now covered in graffiti. It (or rather, external shots and imagined internal ones) has featured in a few TV dramas about the Cold War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsberg

[I do have a nice photo of one of the 'Gatow Deterrent' Chipmunks, taken from the other, flying over it, just after the 'Fall of the Wall'; given me by a former RAF Gatow contact. As it's not my copyright I shall not post it here, but have used it in lectures about Cold War aviation]