4G whiz and wind resistance

At least a couple of good things happened on the technology front this week. First was the announcement about 4G phones. This is great news for commuters, as it will allow for much faster phone conversations on the part of their fellow travellers. Instead of having to spend an entire journey overhearing someone droning on about the sales conference at Sunshine Desserts, or last night’s tiff with the boyfriend – “I’m like ... so he’s like … and I’m like …”, it will all be over in a single nanosecond, and they will be able to enjoy the rest of their commute in peace. Of course, they’ll still arrive 11 minutes late, wrong kind of absurdity on the line, Raynes Park.

So much for improvements to the ambient sonic environment. Now we turn to its visual analogue. Yes, analogue, I like analogue, analogue is good. Wind factories are rather more contentious. Other than to cause offence, controversy and nuisance I’m not quite sure what the point is of these establishments, except perhaps the surefire acquisition of some kind of subsidy, something vaguely green-related and thus under no circumstances to be questioned. Money, in other words (well, it used to be green).Therefore the second piece of good news is that I’m able to report a small local victory in this respect, and all praise is due to those tireless campaigners who have had a clutch of these sinister monstrosities rejected. Turbines, that is. Probably there will be an appeal, which ones hopes, but does not necessarily expect, will be fair, democracy being what it is in this country, but for now victory lies with the common man. The reasons why this particular proposal has been rejected are several, and site-specific, and need not concern us here. The serious point I want to emphasise is this. Notable, as always, in arriving at this decision, was that objection on the basis of people simply not wanting to have to look at, or being forced to see, these immense structures was not allowed as an admissible argument. This is outrageous.

There are hundreds of these schemes around the country and it seems to me a criminal waste of time, effort, and money - as well as a denial of democracy and a cause of huge amounts of anguish - that not only does each one have to be fought separately, from scratch as it were, by residents with no training in such matters and with better things to do, but that objectors have to resort to spurious arguments in order to have the unwanted proposals thrown out. They are forced into creative dishonesty. They have to establish statistics about potential distractions to passing drivers, interference with air traffic control, confusion to the local bat population. Objective, quantifiable factors which really don’t matter to them. They can’t just say, “we don’t want them, they spoil our view, they ruin the landscape, we hate the damn things like everbody does”. Why shouldn’t they? “Sorry, mate, that’s subjective; not allowed”.

Of course, willing philistines can always be found and paraded who will say they like wind turbines, think they’re rather beautiful and hint at mystery and romance in a wistful kind of way, but to any unbiased, sensitive person with a love of rural, coastal or even urban beauty the fact is that large swathes of the UK and its shorelines have been and continue to be visually damaged by these contraptions, which even their proponents admit to be of doubtful and at best minimal efficiency.  They are not going to go anywhere near meeting our future energy requirements. The so-called environmentalists, who are so up themselves about saving the planet are, it seems, quite happy to destroy the visual environment, and take a perverse delight in doing so. This is not an aspect of the environment noticeably important to or appreciated by any other species than ourselves. The eco-warriers evidently don’t realise that humans inhabit an ecological niche too, one which we invest with complex psychological and aesthetic values and meanings. They don’t understand that subjective assessments are what we as human beings do. Our subjectivity is what makes us human. No other species has this faculty, however small and furry and lovely and hard to find. While we are morally obliged to take care of our planet and all its inhabitants, we have rights too, and the right to an unspoiled landscape and an unsullied view is one of them.

In this case, ironically, it’s other inhabitants, other biological species, the smaller the better, who we rely upon for help. This works as follows. The best way of objecting to anything like a wind factory is to discover, or if necessary invent, some obscure kind of putrid weed or malicious rodent which any sane person would immediately hose with something rich in organophosphorus derivatives. Saying you don’t want the wind factory won’t work, and if you try, you’ll be stigmatised as a NIMBY, a BANANA, a NEWARK or some other unpleasant acronym or anagram. What you need to say is this. Well, would you credit it? Would you just effing believe it? Someone’s only gone and reported a possible sighting of a lesser-brained, poo-eating, SARS-transmitting, ever-so-rare, stinging arse-beetle right where the turbines are going to be built (and for turbines read HS2, airport runway, whatever). I mean, it may be the only one this side of Tasmania. Then wait for the response, which will be - OK, fine, project cancelled.

Easy. Too easy. There’s something wrong with our sense of values here. I’ll be pondering the subjective appreciation of our surroundings in future postings.

22 February 2013

A new departure

‘The Railway: Keeping Britain on Track’, shown on BBC2 earlier this week, portrayed the train services from King’s Cross as a farcically dysfunctional, outrageously expensive, unbearable to use, national embarrassment. Some of the staff, however, when not being patronised by a manager who evidently modelled himself on David Brent (yeah?), were clearly saints; overworked, underpaid, unappreciated, on the front line to passengers who were justifiably angry or despairing. The one good thing shown in the programme was the new grafted-on western concourse at King’s Cross.

A curious structure, a lilac-tinted exercise in conic sections meets string vest meets Las Vegas, the new concourse provides additional space for would-be passengers to view the destination boards reading “Cancelled” and “Delayed”. Passengers who have managed to arrive on incoming trains are meanwhile channelled through the existing frontage of the station, and out into the street or down into the Underground. What goes against the historical grain with this development is that, traditionally, it was arriving passengers who had to be impressed, not those about to leave. Historically, railway companies competed to provide a grand entrance to the city, whether it be in size of trainshed, lavishness of hotel, or – in the case of Euston – Doric Arch, the legally vandalised remains of which lie, allegedly, beneath the River Lea.

With the arrival of mass air travel, effort and expenditure became similarly focused on impressing the new arrival, not just with the airport itself, but with the wealth and sophistication of the host city, region, or nation – hence Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK, the “steering wheel” at LAX, and the doughnut-shaped Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle. Ironically, though, arriving airline passengers typically get herded into low level immigration halls and baggage claim areas before finding their way out into town, and see little of the architectural wonders above. Instead it is the departing passenger, the anticipation of his journey artificially protracted thanks to procedures enforced in order to stymie those who would otherwise blow him out of the sky, who gets time to enjoy the architecture – at least from an internal perspective.

And this is the situation at King’s Cross where, in this respect at least, rail travel has now caught up with aviation. Once again, it is departure rather than arrival that is celebrated, and there is time and space to savour one’s imminent voyage of adventure, perhaps to Stevenage or Biggleswade, Peterborough maybe, or with any luck somewhere a little further north.

15 February 2013

The Joy of HS?

It would not be the first time that a hurried, ill-considered and spuriously conceived solution to the inadequacies of Britain’s railways would have been imposed upon the population. When pondering such an eventuality, sometimes it’s useful to examine historical precedent, and current television schedules are helping us to do so. In the same week that the route of HS2 north from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds was announced, BBC2 have shown (1) “Beating Beeching” – a celebration of some of Wales’ former steam railways - and (2) the endlessly upbeat, brightly-shirted and lightly-luggaged Michael Portillo travelling on the restored West Somerset Railway, formerly part of the GWR to Minehead. Such lines are very evidently loved and are popular; the affection they arouse speaks of values immensely more profound and valuable than financial profit or efficient transit. An intimacy with the sense a place and an enjoyment of the very experience of travel – and quite possibly a rejection of the shallow present – are among the emotions they engage.

Arguably, half a century ago, Dr Richard Beeching did more than any other single individual to destroy valued components of our national heritage, and the lifestyles, livelihoods, values and imagery that went with them. However, hate figure though he was and remains, just like his lookalike Heinrich Himmler, he was “only obeying orders”. For the government of the day recognised that something had to be done to make the nation’s railways more efficient, and Beeching was their chosen axeman. Unfortunately, the odious Doctor threw out the baby with the bathwater, the baby in this case answering to names like Birmingham Snow Hill and Nottingham Victoria – along with parts of rural and industrial Wales, holiday Cornwall, normal Norfolk, and much else.

We are in a similar situation now. Today, we know that we need high speed rail routes in the UK. Most other developed countries have built them, and anyone who has travelled on such lines overseas, or on HS1, can attest to their attractions and to how they alter one’s perception of distance and of the geographical relations between places. Unfortunately, as with Beeching, the primary motivation for HS2 as presented so far appears to be purely financial and political rather than anything much to do with travel, and its announcement has been accompanied prominently by predictable mantras about “growth” and “regeneration”.

The idea of high speed rail routes is a good and exciting one, reduced journey times can be valuable and speed itself can be fun, but in our enthusiasm for these routes it’s important that we build them for the right reasons and in the right place. Something like HS2, with add-ons, needs to be built, and the sooner the better. Hopefully, what we have been shown so far is only a work-in-progress, and something better will emerge in due course, tempered by discussion, debate, and informed input. For the moment, the plan appears to pose a number of bizarre peculiarities, among them being that the proposed lines:

·         Originate from Euston, where there is relatively poor Underground connectivity, and none with Crossrail or Thameslink;

·         Do not connect with Eurostar;

·         Do not connect to or go via Heathrow;

·         Terminate at Curzon Street in Birmingham, thus avoiding the extensive interchange facilities at New Street;

·         Pass directly beneath East Midlands Airport without stopping;

·         Avoid the city centres of Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield.

One can see the point of hub stations, but not if the time taken to reach them negates the time saved by the faster trains. One suspects a lack of joined-up thinking and of a project being driven purely by economic factors – perhaps spurious ones or those not amenable to reliable estimation - rather than on utility.

It may be argued that if we are going to spend huge sums on high speed rail, why not spend a few more billion to get a network that might actually be useful to real people. What we risk otherwise is another Beeching-style disaster that future generations will have to repair, and which generations even further on will be able to make endearing little TV documentaries about.

For the moment this is a plan bolstered by attempts at cost-benefit quantification. That the figures may be completely wrong doesn’t matter; they have been calculated precisely using impeccably up-to-date techniques and technologies, they are objective, you bet, and the necessary people have been suitably impressed. The sort of people who talk about “train stations”. As always, quantitative wins over qualitative, objective over subjective, hard over soft, simply because they are easier to deal with – valid or not - and to present convincingly.

Subjective, aesthetic, environmental, ethical and personal factors – the ones that matter to most people – are invariably dismissed in decision making of this sort. Sadly, that says a lot about the priorities of those who govern us and, indeed, about the kind of people we are. But just because the powers that be choose to ignore them, such factors haven’t gone away, they never do, and from time to time they’re celebrated by truly intelligent people, as some of them were earlier this week.

Tuesday evening (29 January) saw the return of the wonderful Jonathan Meades to BBC4 in “The Joy of Essex”. Never mind Essex and the gently punning title, Meades is himself a pure joy to watch and to listen to, one of the few mind-expanding legal highs available via a television set, although I know he irritates some people. This time his stereotype-ignoring and cliché-bashing itinerary included examples of early modernism in East Tilbury and Silver End, the relics of doomed utopian communities that occasionally turned dystopic (“the full horror of team spirit”), and – shall we say - specialised places like Frinton, Canvey Island and Jaywick – all, in their way, refuges from the petty tyrannies of governments and bureaucracies. “Under the counter Essex”, homes for “the little people”, the “poor whites”. We need such refuges more than ever today.

Among his many erudite, hilarious, subversive, wackily allusive and laterally-thought observations was one about how we have fetishised Nature, so that we give greater rights to wildlife than we do to mere people, or “homesteaders” as Meades called them in this instance. So, if we accept Meades’ argument, as I do, all those who find their homes and their lives blighted by the prospect of HS2 had better get busy and discover some obscure variety of weed or rodent living on their patch; just saying that they “don’t want HS2 here” will only evoke the sarky “NIMBY” reflex from those trough-snouters who stand to gain from the project or those who smugly live nowhere near the proposed trajectory. Even the remotest hint of a possibility of a rare newt should do the trick and will send the planners scurrying back to their virtual drawing boards. Purely human, quality-of-life concerns won’t do it, I’m afraid.

Meades clearly has a strong feeling for the qualities of places – he observes, he connects apparently disparate ideas together creatively, and he and his articulacy challenge us to follow him. I suspect his trademark verbal extravaganzas sometimes lurch into amused self-parody, but no matter. What he does is to bring meaning and value to the places he visits, an arbitrary, qualititative and subjective process, but one that he shares with us in his uniquely entertaining style. Rather than impoverishing the lives of many while lining the pockets of the few, this is an approach that adds value to life and to our geographical environment, a value that lies way beyond the calculating abilities of the likes of Beeching or the proponents of the current version of HS2.

1 February 2013