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The government MP for Lancaster and Wyre, Cat Smith, has today confirmed that mobile operator Vodafone has finally erected a new but temporary mobile mast in central Lancaster, which became necessary after the old site was taken offline in April 2026 following repeated attacks of vandalism by gangs of youths.
The problems appear to have started well over a year ago after the original mast site, which was shared with O2 (Virgin Media) and sat on top of a derelict building on Fenton Street in the centre of Lancaster, came under repeated criminal attack. Sadly local efforts to tackle the problem were unsuccessful and Vodafone ended up deeming the mast site to be “non-viable”.
Vodafone then switched the site off and began hunting for viable alternative sites, but they acknowledged that this was likely to take anything from 12 to 36 months to deliver (i.e. finding the location, securing planning permission and then construction). Such a long wait was obviously quite a big problem for a central city mast site, which serves quite a few customers and thus caused a serious problem with signal reception in the city centre.