BT has installed a giant electronic information screen at the top of the iconic BT Tower in London. The 360 degree LED screen – which is believed to be the highest of its kind in Europe and the Americas – will be used as an information band, showing messages that will be visible from various locations across the city. The information band was switched on for the first time during the National Lottery Draw Show on BBC One on Saturday 31st October.

The screen is over 280 square meters, equivalent to half the length of a football pitch. It is wrapped around the Tower’s 36 and 37th floors, at a height of 167 meters above street level.  

At this height the screen has to endure harsh weather conditions, including hurricane force winds. It has been fully tested at the Jules Verne climatic wind tunnel in Nantes, France, for combined climatic effects including wind speeds of up to 190km per hour as well as rain, snow and high temperatures

Sir Michael Rake, BT Chairman, said: “As one of the tallest and well-known landmarks in London, it’s fitting that the BT Tower is being used for its original purpose – to be an information tower.”

Damian Rogan, Associate at international multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy Buro Happold, said: “The new LED screen required a new structural support system to be built from components taken up in the lift and assembled like a Mecano set behind an enclosed scaffold around the top of the tower.

“Given the tower's height, the wind loads on the screen are equivalent to hurricane force. The new structure and screen were built to a tight schedule and the added difficulties of the extreme working conditions made this a challenging project.”

The screen is made up of 177 separate panels and consists of 177,000 pixels and 529,750 LEDs. The installation of the 3.6 tonne screen at the top of the Tower has been an extremely challenging construction and engineering task. However, it took only 11 weeks to install the screen from the time the first piece of scaffold went up to the final piece of scaffolding being removed.

It has involved:

• 2,700 separate trips in the lift to transport materials to the top of the Tower
• Designing the scaffolding by computer and erecting over 7 miles of scaffolding components
• Installing nearly 2.5 miles of power, lighting and electrical cable
• Tethering all tools and materials, including 11,000 scaffold components, to the construction workers and engineers
• Making nearly 1500 wind checks, as no installation work could take place in winds more than 15kts
• 114 construction workers and engineers
• A total of 30,600 man hours to complete the work

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Happold Consulting is a strategic management consultancy for the built environment
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Buro Happold is a multi-disciplinary international practice of consulting engineers established in 1976. It offers civil and structural engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering, quantity surveying, building services and environmental engineering, health and safety management, infrastructure and traffic engineering, ground engineering, façade engineering, fire engineering, computational fluid dynamics analysis, inclusive design consultancy, project management, urban design and a range of specialist CAD services.