this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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Swede here, I have seen the same photos and Wikipedia articles about this structure making the rounds on forums for years, which is good, it is a cool structure, but it is starting to get a bit boring....
So how do I change that?
Well, what about posting more photos that I haven't seen being posted nearly as often?
Ok, I can do that, here in Sweden we have a website called Digitalt Museum, where hundreds of museums and local history societies publish their collections and you can easily search through it all.
Here are some interesting photos of the tower:
There were other telephone towers in Sweden at the same time, here is the one in Uppsala:
Gothemburg:
And Gävle:
I hope you have enjoyed these photos!
It's cool that even on a functional building like this at that time they tried to make it look nice with ornamentation. Unlike today where most stuff is just a boring box.
This was built during a time of romantic nationalism in Sweden/Europe, a time of adding flair to buildings and being proud of your country.
Almost the entire area around Telefontornet as shown in the pictures was later razed and new buildings constructed.
That was needed, the houses were full of social misery, few had running water or a toilet, there was little sunlight in the houses, waste disposal was bad and people were suffering.
So the entire concept of how the city worked was changed.
New suburban centers were built, with shops, doctors, dentists, schools, parks, cinemas, restaurants, apartment buildings and more, they were then connected to the city with public transport.
Miljonprogrammet, in the 60s and 70s was a huge government program accomplish this, you can read more about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Programme
Sorry for the digression, I just wanted to put some context to the period.
Thanks for the info. It must have really been a big change to integrate more technology into houses than there was in the previous centuries and improve the living circumstances more to what we are used to today. In Germany this modernisation came more naturally since after WW2 a lot was destroyed and had to be built new anyway.