Revolt

Before the Tetra mast was erected in Llanidloes, the nearest thing to a health scare there was the fact that the local Kwik Save was no longer selling prunes in apple juice.

Llanidloes is a small, open-hearted market town in a damp and lovely valley in mid Wales. It is a town with a strong identity and a long memory; some people still live in the street where they were born. Solidly Welsh, and surrounded by farmland, Llanidloes also has a smattering of English blow-ins; people who are into organic veg and eco-design and jazz, and who chirpily co-exist with no more than the odd grumble from locals about the ‘hippy contingent’.

And then, stealthily, on a bank holiday weekend in May, the mobile phone company O₂ (through its subsidiary MMO₂) erected a Tetra mast in the heart of the town. O₂’s idea of ‘consultation’ was legal but risible: it did little more than inform the mayor and town council that it was putting the mast up, whether Llanidloes liked it or not.

And Llanidloes did not.

There was an outcry. Posters were put up in windows, a march held, banners made. (One banner flew from the top of the mast itself.) Llanidloes...

To view the rest of this article - you must be a paying subscriber and Login