Mobile Operator Tries to Hide UK Mobile Mast.. As a Toilet Brush?

Sometimes when you try particularly hard to hide something big, you end up making it even more obvious – this seems to be what happened after EE and Three UK attempted to hide a new 25-metre mobile mast in the town of South Queensferry by making it look like a tree. But it ended up looking like a giant toilet brush instead.

Now admittedly, we all know that new mobile (4G and 5G) masts – particularly the bigger installations – aren’t exactly the most cosmetically attractive of digital infrastructure deployments and related planning applications often draw objections from the local population. The downside of this is that local mobile coverage and mobile broadband performance may suffer if such projects cannot proceed.

In that sense, it’s good to see an operator trying a new-ish approach (it’s been done before), but we’re not quite sure if this particular case worked out quite how they intended. “Oh dear it definitely looks nothing like a tree and very much like a gigantic toilet brush,” said one local in South Queensferry who saw the new mast, which is pictured over at Talker (you really do have to see it to believe it). Probably not quite what the operators intended.

The related planning application (20/05809/FUL), which took us awhile to find but was raised by the umbrella Mobile Broadband Network Limited (MBNL) network sharing organisation on behalf of EE and Three UK, was approved in June 2021 and also includes some mock-up images – these, to our eyes, look considerably less eye-catching than the final product.

“The proposed mast shall be painted to match that of the nearby trees prior to it becoming operational,” said the application. Now in theory, this idea should have worked quite well, but the fact that the mast is twice as high as the nearby trees, has a lot of spacing between its “branches” and seems to be modelled on a different species of tree from those nearby, does indeed make it look a little bit like a giant loo brush.

A Spokesperson for MBNL said:

“The planning authority accepted the operators’ proposals for a tree-styled mast to reduce the visual impact whilst ensuring critical mobile coverage will continue to be available to customers in the area, and accordingly the design was approved.”

Still, it’s a reasonable effort and in the right setting it might have even been more effective, but hay, on the table of ‘mast ugliness’, it could always be.. worse (e.g. Vodafone’s upside down lawnmower).

UPDATE 12:27pm

The URL to the visualisation document with MBNLs mock-up images kept changing. Due to this, I’ve pasted one of the mock-up images from the original plan below.