[heads]

I feel like my memory (and that article) aren’t very clear on this, but Backbone in spirit felt quite different to the series of high bandwidth towers of which Telecom Tower was one part.

Regular lets-call-grandma telecommunications would be handled by your well know, friendly, cuddly round towers like Telecom Tower and Stokenchurch just next to the Chiltern cutting on the M40.

Sinister everyone-has-died communications would be handled by the mysterious, dangerous looking towers like Highgate and Kelvedon Hatch. These towers resemble high tension power lines and growl at you if you look at them for too long.

This site has a lot more detail on how the two ended up as one, over the years:

https://www.subbrit.org.uk/features/backbone-microwave-relay...