Keep the campfire burning: a thread of whimsy from Baden-Powell to Berners-Lee

May 14, 2013

Cubs badges

As a child I hated Cubs. All that running around and shouting, the church parades, and camping on a damp field at the edge of Danbury Common.

But in a twist of fate I find myself parent to three boys far more enthusiastic than I ever was; my oldest recently got a badge marking seven years – more than half his lifetime – as a Beaver, Cub or Scout.

That’s seven years of walking him to and from the weekly meetings in the school hall, driving to the scout hut down dark country lanes, dropping off and picking up at obscure Dales campsites that satnav passed by. If the youngest one follows in his muddy footsteps I’ll be doing the same for the next seven years as well.

I remain both surprised and grateful that there are grown-ups who volunteer to take my children camping so I don’t have to.

And just recently I’ve come to wonder at the infrastructure that has grown up around the scouting movement in the 106 years since Robert Baden-Powell ran his first experimental camp at Brownsea Island, Dorset.

Within an hour’s drive of our home there are dozens of scout sites tucked away in valleys, down farm tracks, one on an unpromising gap between a canal and a railway line. The Wakefield District even has its own canal boat.

Then there’s the knowledge and social capital. My boys are fourth-generation scouts – at least four of their eight great-grandparents were active in the movement. Yet their campfires, penknives, funny handshake and woggles would be instantly recognisable to scouts who bob-a-jobbed in last Great Depression.

I like to think that our digital culture will develop like this.

When I reflect on its future, I’m not that interested in whether we’ll experience life through screens, or glasses or holograms or deep brain implants, or whatever. The scout hut now has flushing toilets, not a hole in the ground, but the boys would still pee against a tree if you let them.

What matters to me as a second-generation geek is the culture and shared set of values that emerges in a movement over multiple lifetimes.

I relish the thought of heritage servers and listed fibre optic cables.

How brilliant would it feel to comment on a 50-year-old Basecamp, or push to a 100-year-old Github repository?

Imagine watching the accelerated sights of a webcam that has lain forgotten on someone’s window sill for a century or more. Or sifting through an heirloom dataset.

How will the do-ocracies that power hackspaces and open source projects manage the passing of batons from generation to generation?

Will the elders entreat sceptical youths to eschew the home comforts of AI-generated code for the delights of hand-whittled trinkets in Python?

In 2093, will our great-grandchildren gather to mark 100 years since the first experimental website was put up by Tim Berners-Lee (like Baden-Powell a knight of Britain’s exclusive Order of Merit)? What greetings will they use? What songs will sing?

And how will the network bear the scars of countries that have come to blows, made peace and repaired the damage, as have many of the nations in the worldwide community of scouts?

I picture a world much more complex than ours, more resilient too, yet in some ways instantly recognisable.

The example of scouting makes me optimistic about the decades to come – not because of the things we’ll invent between now and then, but because of the experiences we’ll share; because the future will have more history behind it.

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How’s it going to end?

January 29, 2013

For the past four years a story has accreted on this blog. It’s a meta-narrative, a story about stories.

Looking back, I believe the arc began with the partial collapse of Leeds’ Temple Works. That’s what led me to encounter the people who made this city, and then to talk about them in pixels, in print and in person.

Along the way, I have questioned what it means to tell a story in the place where it happened. I have celebrated the often overlooked asset of narrative capital, the capacity of a population to imagine and make a future out of the stories they inherit from the past.

And for a while now I’ve felt as if this arc is drawing to a conclusion, only I don’t know how it ends.

It’s something about England’s North. Not the North of cliches, of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and flat caps and “Good Honest Broadband from Yorkshire”, but rather the future of the North. Not the future of economic development and high speed rail and devolution of power, though all of those things make a difference. It is something about a new idea of the North, a social and cultural and technological way of being that grows out of all that has happened here thus far.

As evidenced by the paragraph above, I am rather better at saying what it isn’t than what it is, so in a bid to hasten the moment of closure, I have taken two steps.

First, I have begun to collate my talks and blog posts into the structure of book, which I plan to release under the same Creative Commons license as this blog. It will be a tentative, provisional book, one with version control and footnotes, but I feel this will help me to get the ideas in my head out of alpha and into some shape where others can engage more easily with the emergent arc.

Second, with Imran Ali and Andrew Wilson, I started to collect examples of what the New Idea of the North might look like. We made a Tumblr and started to throw in stuff that seemed relevant. We’ve had a couple of sessions where we tried to wring meaning out of all the stuff we’ve collected. I think it’s helping but we’re still not there.

The New Idea of the North

So please take a look at the Tumblr, tell us what you see. I can’t wait to find out where it leads us.

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Five minutes, one year, two buildings, a thousand stories

January 9, 2013

Notes from my presentation at Bettakultcha, Leeds Town Hall, on Wednesday 9 January 2013.

Some rights reserved by tricky (rick harrison)

What an amazing venue. I could spend the next five minutes just talking about this building. I could tell you how the Leeds Corporation raised a special tax and set a budget of £35,000 to build a grand new town hall.

I could tell you how an unknown East Riding architect named Cuthbert Brodrick won the competition with his Classical Baroque design, championed by Charles Barry, architect of the Palace of Westminster.

Slide04

I could tell you how, part-way through construction, rivalry with surrounding towns spurred on the architect and his clients to add a tower and bust their budget, finally completing the structure at a cost of £125,000. But you know all that stuff, right?

I could tell you about the year construction began, 1853. A year of industrial strife in which Preston cottonworkers were locked out of their mills, inspiring novels by both Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell.

A year of innovation. Dr John Snow anaesthetised Queen Victoria with chloroform during the birth of her eighth child. The year Sir George Cayley’s terrified butler flew across Brompton Dale, near Sarborough, and resigned as soon as got back down to earth. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

Because while the great and the good of this city were signing the contract to build this town hall, a mile across town, a very different group of people were laying the foundations of another remarkable building.

The area on Richmond Hill known as “the Bank” was populated in early Victorian times by Irish weavers and labourers, drawn to the city to work in factories and construction.

Their numbers were swollen in the 1840s by refugees from Ireland’s Great Famine. The Bank was a slum, with badly-built housing, poor drainage, overcrowding and disease.

www.leodis.net

Yet in this place, the poor Catholic congregation, with their priests and an order of Oblate nuns, found the resources to replace their makeshift church with a massive cathedral-scale Gothic creation known as Mount St Mary’s. They called it the Famine Church.

Some rights reserved by phill.d

It took four years to build. In that time, workers were killed and injured in a lightning strike; the order of nuns faced financial ruin, and due to old mine-workings the foundations below the ground cost as much as the structure above.

Some rights reserved by phill.d

The church’s first architect was York-born Joseph Hansom, inventor of the horse-drawn Hansom Cab. Later additions were by  Edward Welby Pugin, whose father gave us the rich interiors of the Palace of Westminster.

In Bradford in 1858, John Ruskin asked why it was that the churches of the period were so often Gothic, while the mills and mansions were Classical. Which is more than just a question of taste.

But now you live under one school of architecture, and worship under another.
What do you mean by doing this?

Ruskin hated Classical buildings because every detail had to be specified according to the laws of proportion and precedent – that pesky golden ratio. Symmetry trumps practicality. Perfection frustrates adaptation.

If you… make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.

With Classical, it’s all big design upfront. Adding the Town Hall tower, was costly and disruptive. At St Mary’s it was natural for Pugin’s transepts to blend into Hansom’s nave. A tower was planned, but, no matter, it never got one.

Mount St Mary’s Church was in use for more than 130 years. But since 1989 it has lain empty, stripped of its contents and allowed to decay.

Some rights reserved by phill.d

A sign on the vaulted front door said, “Keep Out, Private, Danger” – a warning, a threat and a promise.
Bernard Hare, ‘Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew’

The English Heritage Grade II* Listing says it is “An important building on a prominent site,” with “fine proportions and remains of important features.”

Some rights reserved by phill.d

Developers now have planning permission for “a scheme that preserves the most important parts of the buildings and creates an innovative and exciting new residential development.” I really hope it succeeds.

It’s worth reflecting on the differences between these two buildings, Leeds Town Hall and Mount St Mary’s. Both begun in the same year, but on different sides of the tracks. One Classical, the other Gothic.

One built by civic power, the other by the faith of an immigrant community. I am neither Irish nor Catholic – I was married here in the Town Hall. But both buildings have provided a stage over the years for marking our city’s countless births, marriages and deaths.

One well-maintained and in use to this day, the other neglected now for two dozen years. What do their parallel stories tell us about the kind of city we want this to be?

Thanks to Richard and Ivor for giving me yet another five minutes on the Bettakultcha stage, and to Phill Davison for the many wonderful photos of Mount St Mary’s which I used in my presentation. For more on the history of church, head over to the Leeds Civic Trust bookshop and buy a copy of Pat Gavan’s ‘Mount St Mary’s Church 1851-2000′.

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Three machines made in Leeds

December 8, 2012

For my wife’s family it is the crockery. Staffordshire-raised, they can’t resist upturning plates and bowls to check their makers’ marks - Doulton, Wedgwood and what-have-you. And my own father grew up near Sheffield, so in restaurants I also study the knives and forks – David Mellor was a Noughties Brit cuisine staple.

But Leeds, well Leeds made all sorts of stuff, and much of it too big and heavy for fine dining. So here I present three machines that have recently caught my familiarity-biased eye – all of them survivors still making their marks on the world in different ways.

Thing 1. I’m loving Chris Thorpe’s series on “Preserving the past with the near future” – the story of Winifred, a Hunslet-built steam engine that has travelled to Wales, the USA and back before being recorded as part of a unique project with lasers, 3d-printers and stuff.

The work is beautiful, and so are Chris’s blog posts describing the project at the Bala Lake Railway, especially like the bit about how future generations might view the recording.

Thing 2. On the first Sunday of many months, I had my Remember The Milk app pop up a repeating reminder, if in London, to visit the Kirkaldy Testing Museum a block inland from the Tate Modern at Bankside. Last Sunday we did, and were not disappointed.

David Kirkaldy was so convinced of the need for independent testing of construction materials that he commissioned at his own expense a massive testing machine from Greenwood and Batley of Armley.

Kirkaldy's testing machine - Wikimedia Commons

The machine served for 99 years through three generations of a family business, crushing, pulling and bending metal girders, concrete beams and much more – literally testing to destruction. Now it is cared for by knowledgeable and enthusiastic volunteers. You should visit too.

Thing 3. At the back of my mind since our summer holiday in Scotland, this…

… a Leeds-built John Fowler & Co. steamroller upcycled into play equipment in a park at Aberfeldy. I guess there must be a few of these in playgrounds around the world. With a bit of imagination, you can flatten anything.

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For Ada Lovelace Day: Eleanor Coade, technology entrepreneur of the 18th Century

October 16, 2012

It’s Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. In previous years I’ve written about Elizabeth Montagu, Lizzie Le Prince and Laura Willson.

This time I want to highlight the unique achievements of Eleanor Coade, creator and entrepreneur behind one of the most durable and effective building materials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the eponymous Coade Stone.

This remarkable survivor by London’s Westminster Bridge is a fine example of Mrs Coade’s artificial stone, the ingredients of which are simple but the production process apparently fraught with complexity. Others at the time tried to make the material, but Coade’s London factory was the only one to produce it successfully at scale.

Examples can still be seen outside the John Soane Museum, Somerset House, Castle Howard and elsewhere.

Eleanor Coade was born in Exeter in 1733, and moved to London around 1760. She was unmarried, the title Mrs being accorded to her as a businesswoman rather than as a wife.

In late 1769 she bought a struggling artificial stone business sited on the South Bank where the Royal Festival Hall now stands. Her Wikipedia entry notes:

Coade’s success as a business woman was very rare in the Georgian era. She was a hard-working individual who concentrated on methodical procedures to produce consistently high quality products. She was the first and only person to succeed in the artificial stone business thanks to a combination of managerial skills, entrepreneurial flare and a talent for marketing and public relations.

She closely supervised both the preparation of clay mixtures and the firing process for all her products. Having bought Daniel Pincot’s struggling business within two years she took the decision to sack him for disciplinary reasons, and confirmed her decision on September 11 and 14 by adverts in The Daily Advertiser, Gazetteer and The New Daily Advertiser.

She cultivated strong business relationships with respected architects and designers, including Robert Adam, James Wyatt, Humphry Repton, John Nash and Sir John Soane, because she could produce multiple copies of their designs. Her success may be gauged by Josiah Wedgwood’s complaint that he ‘could not get architects to endorse his new chimneypiece plaques’

And those are the reasons why Elanor Coade stands out to me – the combined qualities of attention to detail and to the bigger picture make her a true Georgian technology entrepreneur.

Read more about Ada Lovelace Day at findingada.com.

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Mr. SMEATON IN UR RIVR FIXIN UR BR1DGE

October 1, 2012

On opening the great arch at London Bridge, by throwing two arches into one, and the removal of a large pier, the excavation, around and underneath the sterlings of that pier, was so considerable, as to put the adjoining piers, that arch, and eventually the whole bridge, in great danger of falling. The previous opinions of some were positive, and the apprehensions of all the people on this head were so great, that many persons would not pass over or under it. The Surveyors employed were not adequate to such an exigency. Mr. SMEATON was then in Yorkshire, where he was sent for by express, and from whence he arrived in town with the greatest expedition. He applied himself immediately to examine the bridge, and to sound about the dangerous sterlings, as minutely as he could. The Committee of Common Council adopted his advice; which was, to re-puchase the stones of all the City Gates, then lately pulled down, and lying in Moorfields, and to throw them pell-mell, (or piece perdu,) into the water, to guard these sterlings, preserve the bottom from further corrosion, raise the floor under the arch, and restore the head of water necessary for the water-works to its original power ; and this was a practice, he had before, and afterwards adopted on other occasions. Nothing shews the apprehensions of the bridge falling, more, than the alacrity with which his advice was pursued : the stones were re-purchased that day ; horses, carts and barges were got ready, and the work instantly begun, though it was Sunday morning. Thus Mr. SMEATON, in all human probability, saved London Bridge from falling, and secured it till more effectual methods could be taken.

Life of Mr John Smeaton, in Reports of the Late John Smeaton: F. R. S., Made on Various Occasions, in the Course of His Employment as a Civil Engineer, 1812

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A {$arbitrary_disruptive_technology} In Every Home

September 10, 2012

The fantastic culmination of James Burke’s talk at dConstruct last week set me thinking about a misleading trope that seems to recur with regularity in our discourse about technology.

Through his 70s TV series James was a childhood hero of mine. I wrote about his talk in my summary of the event, and thanks to the generous and well-organised dConstruct team you can also listen to the whole thing online.

With a series of stories, James showed how chance connections have led to important new discoveries and paradigm shifts – how, for example, a wrecked ship gave rise to the invention of toilet roll. So far, so serendipitous.

But then he set off on a flight of fancy that I found harder to follow, on the implications of nanotechnologies still gestating in the R&D labs. How this stuff would transform the world in the next 30 to 40 years! Not, thankfully, with a Prince Charles grey goo apocalypse but with a triumph of anarchist equilibrium.

How would the Authorities cope when their subjects no longer needed them to arbitrate Solomon-like over scarce resources? How would society be structured in a new world of abundant everything (except maybe mud, apparently the basic element of nanoconstruction)? How would Everything be changed by the arrival of A Nanotechnology Factory In Every Home?

A {$arbitrary_disruptive_technology} In Every Home!

I wondered what other innovations have held such promise. Cue Google Book Search where among the random pickings I find:

  • 1984: “modem in every home”
  • 1978: “robot in every home”
  • 1976: “microprocessor in every home”
  • 1975: “wireless telegraphy in every home”
  • 1943: “television in every home”
  • 1937: “telephone in every home”
  • 1915: “water supply in every home”
  • 1908: “sewing machine in every home”
  • 1900: “piano and good pictures in every home”

And some of the most popular charted with the wonderful Ngram Viewer:

It seems that whenever a transformative technology comes along there are some who dare to dream of its widespread adoption. On paper of course, they are right. I live in a home with all the above (though we in the developed world can all too easily overlook the 780 million people who still rely on unsafe water supplies).

Yet the focus on the domestic obscures the fact that all these technologies and resources are still employed as much, if not more, in our public spaces and workplaces as in our private homes.

  • A fountain in every town square
  • A screen at every bus stop
  • A server in every server farm
  • A robot in every loading bay
  • A sewing machine in every sweat shop

So why the allure of a domestic context?

200 years ago the Luddites found themselves, with good reason, resisting the wrenching of textile trades out of their cottages and into the factories. They responded by machine breaking, not machine making.

Now, however, we look to technology to redress the balance in the other direction. By limboing under a bar of low price and simple operation, goes the narrative, each new technology will find its place in every home, thus setting people free from the tyranny of mass production.

Except that’s not how it really works out. Even for the cheap and plentiful, large-scale industrialisation trumps cozy domestication.

The printing press managed to change society drastically between 1500 and 1800 without the need to deliver hot metal to the home. One in every town appears to have been plenty disruptive enough. And while computer-connected home printers have been a reality for decades the use cases for large-scale industrial printing continue to expand.

The Computer In Every Home was a vision held early on by the pioneers of the Homebrew Computer Club. But as a by-product of ushering in a new era of small-scale tinkering, homebrew hackers Jobs and Wozniak also happened to grow the most valuable single public company of all time!

And while I write this post in a living room stuffed with processing power and data storage, the services that I value most run in and from the network – Gmail, Facebook, WordPress.com, Dropbox – not so much a computer in every home as a home in every computer. What’s more, for this convenience, it appears people are prepared to put their faith in the most unaccountable, parvenu providers.

The same may be true of the 3d printer, current poster child of post-industrialism. The sector is in spitting distance of  sub-$1000, desktop units, but those are unlikely to prove the most popular or productive way to disperse the benefits of this new technology. Far simpler to pack rows of bigger units into factories where they can be more easily serviced and efficiently employed round the clock.

So if the alchemy of nanotechnology does come to pass (and I’ll be stocking up on Maldon mud just in case) then – like it or not – it seems as likely to be a centralised and centralising force as a decentralising one.

Or am I missing something? Economists, historians of science, help me out, please.

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Apple’s real innovation: a gesture made with two fingers

September 2, 2012

Douglas Rushkoff nails my unease at the patenting of gestures, a critical front in the commercial war being waged through intellectual property. At stake is how far governments should grant monopoly rights over something that belongs to all of us: our shared language of words and gestures.

US Patent #7,812,826, though limited and not at stake in the latest Samsung judgement, grants Apple rights over pinch-to-zoom.

What if they had Patented the Alphabet? Rushkoff demands to know. I’d take it further. Patents on gestures take us into the same territory as those on human genes, and on flora and fauna. These are our shared commons; natural attributes that may be discovered and used, but never invented nor enclosed. Opposable thumbs! They’re part of what it means to be human.

And yet, I can’t help thinking that all the focus on Apple’s patents obscures the true reasons for the company’s runaway success in mobile. The mythology around Steve Jobs paints him as heir to Edison, a wizard presiding over a school of invention and creativity. True innovation is not like that and never has been; it’s about much more that just building a better mousetrap.

My favourite definition of innovation is not the usual pat phrase about “making new stuff”, or even “making new stuff useful”. Those focus too much on the outcome at the expense of the process. Instead consider this throwaway line in Bruno Latour’s Aramis:

“a project is considered innovative if the number of actors is not known from the outset.”

That is to say, innovation is the act of cajoling diverse, contradictory and competing interests – eternal human needs, new technologies and entrenched commercial structures. And that is where, in the congealed mobile value chain of the mid-Noughties, Apple deserves some credit.

Mobile had – and still has today – a complex web of interdependent business models. Crouched at the centre were network operators which had risked billions of other people’s money on radio spectrum and infrastructure. They aimed to recoup this investment by distributing heavily-subsidised devices tied to lengthy airtime contracts.

In such a situation, end users could easily become peripheral. Device manufacturers came to see operators, not consumers, as their customers. They became adept at pandering to the operators’ many and varied whims:

  • Multimedia messaging which few people used
  • Front-facing cameras in the hope of a video-calling bonanza
  • Operator-specified applications designed to wring a little more revenue out of their users.

Consumers were baffled by the terminology, sceptical of the benefits and fearful of unpredictable extra charges. And yet the manufacturers and operators remained locked in an arms race to give people more of the wrong things.

Apple, fresh from playing a similar game with the music industry, used its muscle in the market to bulldoze past all that, to appeal over the heads of entrenched interests to end users themselves.

With a high-end device as under-specified as that first iPhone, any other brand would have struggled to get onto operators’ ranges at all. But for Apple? No 3G? No multimedia messaging? No apps (they only came later, remember)? No problem, and throw in a special unlimited data bundle for good measure.

The best thing about the first iPhone was not the satisfying gravitational bounce when you scrolled to the bottom of a screen – there must surely be prior art for that somewhere. What was amazing was the product development process that prioritised that bounce over implementing MMS.

By sticking to its guns, Apple transformed mobile for ever. But that kind of innovation is impossible to patent because it’s about what you have the guts to leave out, much more than what you’re able to squeeze in.

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And Science — we have loved her well

August 16, 2012

And Science — we have loved her well, and followed her diligently, what will she do? I fear she is so much in the pay of the counting-house, the counting-house and the drill-sergeant, that she is too busy, and will for the present do nothing. Yet there are matters which I should have thought easy for her; say for example teaching Manchester how to consume its own smoke, or Leeds how to get rid of its superfluous black dye without turning it into the river, which would be as much worth her attention as the production of the heaviest of heavy black silks, or the biggest of useless guns.

William Morris, ‘Hopes and Fears for Art’, 1882

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“Please join me in a drive for better letters”

May 23, 2012

As a follow-up to the 1951 ‘No Idle Words’ booklet, comes this gem of a letter about writing letters. Its author was Charles Hill, a doctor turned broadcaster and politician who briefly held the office of Postmaster General.

Note also the lovely simplification of the royal coat of arms – just remove all the fussy heraldry from the middle, leaving only the supporters, crown and ribbon – and the brilliant phone number.

Transcript below.

G.P.O. HEADQUARTERS,

ST. MARTIN’S LE GRAND,

LONDON, E.C.1.

TELEPHONE:

HEAdquarters 1234.

11th June, 1956

Dear Colleague,

I am sending this letter to all in the Post Office whose job includes the writing of letters to the public. As a rule Post Office letters are very good. Sometimes they are so good as to make one feel proud. But it does happen that now and again Post Office letters come back to me because they have made members of the public very cross.

Unlike the customers of many private businesses, our customers cannot go elsewhere. Since we are a monopoly, our obligations to the public are all the greater.

A letter which is not clear and polite is just as serious a failure as is a wrong number or a misdelivered parcel. And it is bad in another way. We in the Post Office need the closest co-operation from the public if we are to provide efficient service. Unless the public think of us as a body of friendly, helpful and efficient men and women, we shall not get that co-operation. Bad letters are bad business – and we are in business.

Will you join me in and experiment? Will you re-read your own letters as though they had been sent to you? It can be a useful check to ask oneself as a private citizen what one would think of the writer. Would he seem to be a friendly, understanding, human being anxious to help, or a remote, cold, aloof bureaucrat? If you knew nothing about the Post Office and wanted to know only why you cannot get a telephone or why your letter or parcel went astray or was damaged, would the letter you have written seem clear and polite?

As ordinary individuals writing to a friend, we write simply and clearly. Or most of us do. Only when they pick up their pens in the office do some people sometimes write stiff, long-winded, and obscure letters.

Of course clarity is not all. Sometimes a letter is very clear – all too clear – but not very polite. But the people to whom we write are our customers. We cannot always do what our customers want; but we can, and should, always be polite. If the Post Office has made a mistake, we should apologise.

May I make some other suggestions? Write as nearly as you can as if you were talking to your correspondent. Keep your sentences short and use the simplest and most natural words. User your own words but avoid technical terms and abbreviations. Your correspondent may know little about the Post Office.

If your letter is to promise action of some kind, think out who will do what and say so. If you do not know, find out. If you cannot find out, the chances are that nobody is going to do anything and it’s high time somebody did.

If your letter is clear, polite, and as helpful as possible, you will be making a friend for the Post Office and doing a first-class job.

If for you this advice is unnecessary – as it is for the great majority of our Post Office colleagues – please forgive me for offering it. If not, please join me in a drive for better letters.

Yours sincerely,

Charles Hill

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View – History – Flatten layers: part 2. Anniversaries

April 21, 2012

From the optical illusion of the Russell Square aeroplane to the temporal plywood of anniversaries.

At one level, anniversaries are meaningless folds in the map – artifacts of an arbitrary time-system force-fitted onto the relentless drift of natural history.

An ocean liner strikes an iceberg and sinks. The-square-of-the-number-of-fingers-a-human-has multiplied by the-time-it-takes-for-the-Earth-to-circumnavigate-the-Sun later, we’re watching a 3d cinematic rendering of Leonardo DiCaprio clinging to damp wood.

But the angles at which these glistening shards of the past collide with present-day events can render them impossible to ignore.

London will have a special quality this summer as it hosts the Olympics Games in the sixtieth year of unelected Elizabethan head-of-state-hood.

For 2012 seems to have a particularly fine crop of anniversaries.

I am particularly struck by the way the Luddite bicentenary can be a flashpoint for different interpretations of the past, present and future of the English North.

The way these events ripple through history reminds us that we only ever live partially in the present. There may be a randomness in the way that past events  bounce off each other and recombine, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

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No Idle Words: a style guide for the age of austerity

February 10, 2012

No Idle Words - a photo set on Flickr

Russell Davies’ lovely post on the writing style of the GOV.UK beta inspired me to scan this 1951 Post Office writing guide.

We inherited it from my wife’s grandfather who taught telecommunications at the Post Office’s training college, in the days before BT. If anyone knows more about the booklet I’d love to hear from them.

The author of ‘No Idle Words’ is uncredited, but their  sound advice still holds more than 60 years later. Compare their watchwords with those of GOV.UK:

GPO 1951    GOV.UK 2012 
  • Clear
  • Polite
  • Brief
  • Simpler
  • Clearer
  • Faster

Much of it is timeless good sense, but more than that, the tone seems to chime with the specific spirit of our own age. The GOV.UK people already have a sense of that aesthetic, noting the pioneering influences of the Festival of Britain and Margaret Calvert’s road signage system.

I reckon the Post Office booklet shines a different light on the period, though.

The year of publication marked the fag-end of George VI’s reign and the start of Winston Churchill’s disappointing second term.

From the first word of the title onwards, much of ‘No Idle Words’ is devoted to the negative. Despite the superficial appeal of the call to clarity, the writer’s overriding objective is to save time and cost by fobbing off and ticking off staff and the general public more quickly and directly.

For example from page 15:

I am sorry we cannot at present give you the telephone service you have asked for. The Post Office is alive to the difficulties and incovenience caused by the present shortage of telephones, and is doing what it can to improve the situation. You will be advised as soon as there is a definite prospect of giving you service and in the meantime, it would be a great help to know if you change your address or if you wish to cancel your order.

These are the words of a post-”KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” society. However you put it, there is no glory in telling someone they cannot have a telephone. In an austerity administration all ambition is gone. What remains is for the civil servant to deliver bad news with good grace.

1 Comment | history, introspection, language | Permalink
Posted by mattedgar

History is the handrail

December 18, 2011

History is the handrail for which we reach when knocked off balance by the present day.

Therefore it seems apt that at the Museum of London a “timeline handrail”  runs from 1688 to 2012, around the new Galleries of Modern London.

At first sight this is a cute way to lay out the span of years through the expanse of the gallery, surrounded by some excellent exhibits that bring past generations of the capital’s people back to life.

But the handrail left me feeling queasy, unsteady on my feet, because here London’s past is for sale.

I don’t mind the principle of sponsorship so much as the way it is done. Critically, for £5000 corporations and wealthy individuals can not only affix their names to a year, but also dictate the very events with which that date should be associated.

It’s a strange price, £5000 – beyond the reach of mass participation by ordinary Londoners, yet chickenfeed for the City’s many firms and institutions. And, the website boasts, it counts as gift aid so…

if you are a 50% higher rate taxpayer, your donation could cost you even less at £2,500.

In other words, the rich may occupy a year of London’s narrative for half the sum that their history-loving cleaners or chauffeurs would have to scrimp and save.

Regular followers of my ramblings will know that I have a special thing for the year 1794. I wondered which of the various happenings of that eventful year might have made it onto the timeline.

From the latter…

London

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe. (1-4)

You’ll see where this is leading.

Now I know nothing of Norton Rose LLP and their business. Well done them, I say, for 217 years of lawyering in London.

Yet this entry inadvertently speaks volumes  – more even than those lines of William Blake – about the nature of power in the City of London. The structure of this sponsorship scheme guarantees a history written by the victors. It underwrites the narratives of the already powerful.

When you place your hand on a rail it does more than offer support; it also guides your direction of travel. Where do you want it to lead you?

1 Comment | history, introspection | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by mattedgar

Down with Façadism: a provocation for Culture Hack North

November 12, 2011

I was honoured to be asked to do a short talk on the opening afternoon of the brilliant Culture Hack North event in Leeds this weekend.

For one thing, it was a chance to appear alongside Rachel Coldicutt‘s dream team of Rohan Gunatillake, Natasha Carolan, Lucy Bannister, Helen Harrop, Frankie Roberto and Greg Povey.

Also, I got to try out a half-baked thought about an unexpected way in which situated stories could lead to long-term, physical changes in our cities, even better, to do so with some people whose Culture Hack projects could be pivotal to bringing that change about.

I made a Prezi to go with the talk, but for those who can’t abide all the whizzing and swooping here it is in static words and pictures. I’d love to know what you think.

What if the interior lives of buildings were as exposed as their exteriors?

I ask because I think we’re heading for a profound change in the way we experience our built heritage.

We’ll start by considering a heritage concept that got a bad name in the latter part of the last century. There was a trend for ripping out the hearts of old buildings but leaving the shells intact. Critics called this trend “façadism” – the privileging of the exterior or front to the detriment of the building’s deeper character.

“Façadism (or Façadomy) is the practice of demolishing a building but leaving its facade intact for the purposes of building new structures in it or around it.” – Wikipedia

Here’s a particularly egregious example from Estonia:

Victorian architects and builders sowed the seeds of this practice themselves in the way they put their emphasis on the public face of a structure, while skimping on the unseen parts. Here’s Temple Works in Holbeck, Leeds. In front, it’s a grand millstone grit temple; round the back, nicely detailed but workaday redbrick…

  

That tension remains today. The building’s blue plaque focuses on the spectacular facade, the industrialist and architect who erected it…

But if you listen to local people, the complex is important to them as something else, the unglamorous Northern Distribution Depot of Kay’s Catalogues, the Amazon.com of its day. This sign is from Slung Low’s Original Bearings project which sought to capture some of those real Holbeck stories and expose them on the street…

This is the inside of Kay’s as we found it a couple of years ago, a pre-digital data centre abandoned by its previous occupants…

And still the same site: fittingly, Reality was the name of the last company to occupy the complex…

But now it’s possible to see inside buildings through time and space. The pun is too good to miss…

All this would be academic if it wasn’t for the fact that planning law is shifting, away from purely national, architectural significance, towards a system that gives weight to local people’s views of what’s important in their environment.

The Draft National Planning Policy Framework talks (page 55) about “heritage assets” which should be…

“identified by the local planning authority during the process of decision-making or through the plan-making process (including local listing).”

According to English Heritage, local listing is …

“… a means for a local community and a local authority to jointly decide what it is in their area that they would like recognised as a ‘local heritage asset’ and therefore worthy of some degree of protection in the planning system.” – Good Practice Guide for Local Listing

And while the Tory-led government seems to use localism as cover for an attack on communities’ rights to resist inappropriate developments, the National Trust is leading the fightback by positioning heritage in terms of dialogue between people and places:

“I believe that the planning system should balance future prosperity with the needs of people and places – therefore I support the National Trust’s calls on the Government to stop and rethink its planning reforms.” – National Trust Planning for People petition

The upshot of this focus on local significance is that the images and stories of use that we expose through geo-location and augmented reality could influence which buildings are preserved and reused and which are demolished. Historic buildings won’t just stand or fall on architectural merit, but also on local residents’ attachments to them.

Those attachments tend to arise from the activities carried on inside buildings as much as what they look like on the exterior. I visited the old Majestyk nightclub on City Square a year ago because it was on Leeds Civic Trust’s Heritage at Risk list…

And I found this – a spontaneous display of affection for a derelict building…

And while it’s a striking building in a prominent location, I don’t think whoever wrote that loved it for its architectural merit. They were remembering the good times they had at Majestyk’s – the laughs, the drinks, the music, the snogs.

And then there’s this unassuming late 90s box, called the White House, on Melbourne Street…

It has its own Facebook page! Or rather the people who worked here do…

In this building they launched Freeserve, the UK’s first free ISP which got millions of Britons on the net for the first time. If anywhere deserves local listing for its historic significance surely this does.

But I think the real potential is for places like the Leeds district of Chapeltown. (I owe a debt for many of the ideas in this post to my wife Caroline Newton who has just completed her MSc in Historic Building Conservation, studying the development of the Chapeltown Conservation Area. Ask her about it if you get the chance.)

Currently buildings get protection for their contribution to the Edwardian streetscape. But the really interesting stories are ones like this launderette, which was started as a cooperative in response to the needs of the immigrant community in an area that many had written off as a slum…

Such narrative capital is fragile and often completely disregarded in the name of regeneration. If stories like the laundry coop’s were better known, they might count for something in decision-making about the district.

Finally, this is the Mandela Centre, also on Chapeltown Road…

I stopped to take this picture because I loved the big sign commemorating Nelson Mandela’s visit to Leeds in which his drove through this area. But then I noticed the cups in the window. I have no idea what they’re for, but they speak volumes about the activities that go on in a community centre and the pride of the groups that meet there.

What if those stories were as obvious as the sign on the wall? The great thing is that, for the first time, they could be.

Maybe in the future buildings will no longer need to shout for attention with elaborate archiecture. In fact, to do so will be useless as nobody will see their peacock finery through the data smog. Instead, places will be recognised for the richness of their inner lives, meaning we preserve a fuller, messier cross-section of structures for their historic significance.

Just as in quantum theory, the act of observing changes the outcome. Facadism is dead; the future is all about interiors.

3 Comments | architecture, design, experience, history, introspection, location | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by mattedgar

“If they could sentence me for thinking, I would have been sentenced for life”

October 7, 2011

This Ada Lovelace Day I’d like to introduce you to Laura Ann Willson of Halifax.

The way into this tale, the loose thread that first attracted my attention, is a 1920s advertisement. But tugging that thread a little, Laura Willson’s story just gets better and better. Her achievements, it seems, are so diverse that no one website has hitherto woven them together in one place.

The ad shows a property developer with keen interests in engineering and the conditions of working class life. Laura Wilson combined these passions by providing affordable homes, ready-made for the latest gas and electricity-powered labour-saving devices.

These were homes fit for heroes. Some of the houses still stand today, plain and solid, nearly 90 years on: “modern, attractive, durable”, planned and priced to bring the garden city ethos to ordinary working families.

Besides being the very first woman member of the Federation of House Builders, Laura Willson was one of seven founder subscribers, and served as President, of the Women’s Engineering Society.

The WES still exists with the following aims:

to promote the education of women in engineering sciences and other  skills, the better to fit women for the practice of engineering;

to advance the education of the public concerning the study and  practice of engineering among women; and

to relieve poverty amongst women who are or have been professional or technician engineers or technologists in allied sciences or educated in science or technology or in the art and techniques of engineering and allied sciences or in other disciplines considered by the Council to be complementary, their dependants and (if they are deceased) their former dependants.

If these aims appear now to be uncontentious, remember that at the time of the society’s foundation in 1919, they were highly incendiary. Laura Willson and her co-founders were making a stand for their right to remain in trades previous reserved for men – only briefly opened up to them by the crisis of the First World War.

Because when Laura Willson saw an opening, she took it, bringing her comrades along with her. Note the “MBE” on the property advertisement, one of the first ever awarded. The 1917 citation reads: “Organiser of Women’s Work in Munitions Works in Halifax”.

In a time of crisis the women of Yorkshire answered the call of their country to take up the dirtiest, riskiest jobs, including the filling of shells with live explosives. The number who lost their lives went unappreciated for many years because factory accidents were hushed up to maintain morale.

Here’s Laura Willson pictured in happier times, circa 1912, with her husband, George, also a self-made engineer, and their young daughter.

But rewind just a few more years and we find the same Laura Willson in a different context, her organising talents not always so welcomed by the authorities.

In 1907, as a member of the Women’s Labour League and the Women’s Social and Political Union, she took part in a weavers’ strike and was arrested on a charge of ‘violent and inflammatory speech’.

Given the choice of two weeks’ imprisonment or a 40 shilling fine, she picked prison, becoming one of the first two suffragettes to be locked up in Yorkshire. On leaving Leeds’ Armley Prison, Laura Willson said:

“If they could sentence me for thinking, I would have been sentenced for life. I went to gaol a rebel, but I have come out a regular terror”.

Contrary to the common picture of the genteel suffragette, Laura Willson did not come from middle class stock. She lacked formal education, having started work aged just 10 as a “half-timer” in a West Yorkshire textile mill.

Yet she went on to be an effective and celebrated labour organiser, war hero, engineer, house-builder and pioneer of new technology. Any one of these achievements would make a person noteworthy. This amazing Yorkshirewoman combined them all.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Sources:

See also:

4 Comments | history, introspection | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by mattedgar

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