Lovell met the civil engineer Charles Husband on 8 September 1949, and over the next two years they sketched their way toward a fully steerable dish that no one had ever tried to build. The first major component arrived in 1950, second-hand. Two circular fifteen-inch turret-drive gear sets and their pinions, salvaged from the First World War battleships HMS Revenge and Royal Sovereign as the old ships were broken up, were purchased cheaply and made into the two main altitude bearings around which the rest of the structure was designed. Plans were detailed in a Blue Book presented in March 1951; construction began on 3 September 1952, with foundations sunk ninety feet into the ground. The double railway track that lets the bowl rotate around its azimuth axis took until March 1954 to lay because of the precision required. In February 1954 Lovell met the Air Ministry to ask if they could pay for a more accurate steel-skinned dish that would observe the newly discovered 21-centimetre hydrogen line as well as longer wavelengths. The Ministry passed, but planning had already moved on, and the upgrade was made anyway.

The telescope moved for the first time on 3 February 1957, by an inch. It tilted under its own power on 20 June. First light arrived on 2 August 1957, with a drift scan across the Milky Way at 160 megahertz. The bowl was 76.2 metres across, 3,200 tonnes in total mass, with a bowl alone weighing 1,500 tonnes, and on completion it was the largest steerable radio telescope on Earth. Then Sputnik went up. The Mark I tracked its booster rocket through October and November 1957 and located Sputnik 2's carrier just after midnight on 16 November. Through the next decade the dish tracked Pioneer 1, 3, 4 and 5; Lunik II as it struck the Moon in September 1959; Luna 3 around the far side; Mariner 2 and Venera 4 at Venus; Mars 1 in 1962 and 1963. When Luna 9 made the first soft landing on the Moon in February 1966 and began transmitting photographs back, Jodrell Bank tuned in to the facsimile signal and the British press published the images before the Soviets did. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 the telescope was discreetly turned toward Russian launch sites to give a few minutes' warning of any ICBM launch.

By the mid-1960s the telescope was tired. It had been designed for a ten-year working life, and Husband had been warning about decay since 1963. In September 1967 fatigue cracks were found in the elevation drive system; left alone, the cracks could have jammed the dish or worse. The Science Research Council announced 400,000 pounds for an upgrade in July 1968, and over three phases between 1968 and 1971 the telescope was rebuilt as the Mark IA. An inner railway track was added to take a third of the total weight, the outer track was relaid, and four new bogies joined the four overhauled ones. The work was handed back to the University of Manchester on 16 July 1974, with a final cost, inflated by rising steel prices, of 664,793 pounds and seven pence. On 2 January 1976 the Gale of January 1976 brought ninety-mile-per-hour winds; the towers bowed, a bearing slipped, and after the repair diagonal bracing girders were welded onto the towers to make sure that particular near-miss would not recur.

The Lovell Telescope is no longer the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. The Green Bank dish in West Virginia and the Effelsberg dish in Germany are now bigger. But it remains an extraordinarily productive instrument. Of the original 64 wheels supporting the structure, only two have needed replacement since 1957; one cracked in 2007, another in 2008. Two breeding pairs of wild peregrine falcons, nesting in each of the support towers, keep pigeons from fouling the dish and confusing its sensitive readings with their body heat. The 42-foot dish nearby continuously monitors the Crab Pulsar. As part of MERLIN and the European VLBI Network, the Lovell links up with telescopes across continents to achieve resolutions that no single dish could manage. In February 2005 astronomers using the Lovell discovered VIRGOHI21, a galaxy that appears to be made almost entirely of dark matter, and the telescope continues to discover and time pulsars decades into its operational life.

In September 2006 the telescope won the BBC's online competition for the UK's greatest unsung landmark. Both Lovell and Husband were knighted for their roles in building it, and the dish was designated Grade I listed in July 1988 and the centerpiece of a UNESCO World Heritage inscription in July 2019. From the south-facing windows of the Terminal 1 departure lounge at Manchester Airport, on a clear day, you can see the steel disc against the patchwork of Cheshire fields. It can be picked out from the Pennines, from Winter Hill in Lancashire, from Snowdonia and from Beeston Castle. Close to one of the buildings on site stands a bust of Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish Renaissance astronomer who first argued that the Sun, not the Earth, sat at the centre of things. The dish above him still moves through the sky, listening.