A film critic noted many years ago that French films always seemed to include a scene of family meals around a garden table, while British films generally featured trains pulled by steam engines. The love of steam engines is now obsessional for many people. A thousand or so steam engines in Britain operate on about 150 standard gauge and narrow gauge ‘heritage railways’. All are maintained by amateurs, who spend years of their lives restoring and maintaining machinery that is over 50 years old. They would probably regard it as near-sacrilege to refer to a steam engine as a mere ‘machine’. It is a gleaming, living being, hissing and snorting, fed coal and water, and oiled and polished by its devoted attendants.
It was not always so. I remember as a child my excitement when I travelled on my first diesel-powered train. How much more modern than the dirty black tank engines used by British Railways. The modern world we imagined in the 1950s consisted of fast cars and motorways, concrete and glass skyscrapers, television and jet aircraft. Soon, it seemed, we would be able to fly all over the world and even to other planets. To be modern therefore meant scrapping steam engines, trams, and most of our railways altogether, demolishing smoky Victorian buildings, and clearing land in town centres to widen roads and create urban motorways. People would live in high-rise flats surrounded by parkland, and drive their cars to supermarkets. No town was exempt from this vision of modernity. Birmingham City Council demolished the town square (the Bullring) and replaced it by roads with tunnels underneath for people who persisted in walking rather than driving. Edinburgh commissioned Sir Colin Buchanan to design a would-be urban motorway cutting under Calton Hill, by bridge across to the Royal Mile, thereby cutting in half the most historic street in all Scotland. Edinburgh was lucky: no political party had a majority on the City Council and so there was no dynamic leader to enforce this insanity. Birmingham was less fortunate.
Since the 1960s, modernity has changed. It now means pedestrian-only city centres, efficient urban tram systems, old buildings restored and converted for new uses, and open-air cafes selling good coffee and Mediterranean food. The best new buildings either look like restored old ones or are shaped in strange round forms. Anything in fact, to escape from the square concrete blockhouses inflicted by modernist architects of the 1960s. High-rise blocks of flats are being demolished, usually to the cheers of their former residents. Supermarkets still survive, but may soon begin a long decline as people switch to home delivery. Cities compete for funding to build new urban tramways, often using the same routes as the ones torn up over 50 years earlier. Every country in Europe has, or plans to have, high-speed trains linking its major cities.
How far will this new modernity go? Perhaps motorways will one day seem quaint items of nostalgia. Old driving enthusiasts - possibly an elderly Jeremy Clarkson - will drive their ancient Ferraris up and down short stretches of heritage motorway kept in operation by dedicated preservation movements.
It was not always so. I remember as a child my excitement when I travelled on my first diesel-powered train. How much more modern than the dirty black tank engines used by British Railways. The modern world we imagined in the 1950s consisted of fast cars and motorways, concrete and glass skyscrapers, television and jet aircraft. Soon, it seemed, we would be able to fly all over the world and even to other planets. To be modern therefore meant scrapping steam engines, trams, and most of our railways altogether, demolishing smoky Victorian buildings, and clearing land in town centres to widen roads and create urban motorways. People would live in high-rise flats surrounded by parkland, and drive their cars to supermarkets. No town was exempt from this vision of modernity. Birmingham City Council demolished the town square (the Bullring) and replaced it by roads with tunnels underneath for people who persisted in walking rather than driving. Edinburgh commissioned Sir Colin Buchanan to design a would-be urban motorway cutting under Calton Hill, by bridge across to the Royal Mile, thereby cutting in half the most historic street in all Scotland. Edinburgh was lucky: no political party had a majority on the City Council and so there was no dynamic leader to enforce this insanity. Birmingham was less fortunate.
Since the 1960s, modernity has changed. It now means pedestrian-only city centres, efficient urban tram systems, old buildings restored and converted for new uses, and open-air cafes selling good coffee and Mediterranean food. The best new buildings either look like restored old ones or are shaped in strange round forms. Anything in fact, to escape from the square concrete blockhouses inflicted by modernist architects of the 1960s. High-rise blocks of flats are being demolished, usually to the cheers of their former residents. Supermarkets still survive, but may soon begin a long decline as people switch to home delivery. Cities compete for funding to build new urban tramways, often using the same routes as the ones torn up over 50 years earlier. Every country in Europe has, or plans to have, high-speed trains linking its major cities.
How far will this new modernity go? Perhaps motorways will one day seem quaint items of nostalgia. Old driving enthusiasts - possibly an elderly Jeremy Clarkson - will drive their ancient Ferraris up and down short stretches of heritage motorway kept in operation by dedicated preservation movements.
