The Road to Little Dribbling (33 page)

Whatever the final cost of HS2, all those tens of billions could clearly buy lots of things more generally useful to society than a quicker ride to Birmingham. Then there is all the destruction to the countryside. There is nothing charming about a high-speed rail line. It would create a permanent very noisy, hyper-visible scar across a great deal of classic British countryside, and disrupt and make miserable the lives of hundreds of thousands of people throughout its years of construction. If the outcome were something truly marvelous, then perhaps that would be a justifiable price to pay, but a fast train to Birmingham is never going to be marvelous. The best it can ever be is a fast train to Birmingham.

Remarkably, the new line doesn’t hook up to most of the places people might reasonably want to go. Passengers from the north of England who need to get to Heathrow Airport will have to change trains at a place called Old Oak Common, with all their luggage, and travel the last twelve miles on another service. Getting to Gatwick will be even harder. If they want to catch a train to continental Europe, they will have to get off at Euston station in London and make their way half a mile along the Euston Road to St. Pancras station. It has actually been suggested that travelators could be installed for that journey. Can you imagine traveling half a mile on travelators? Somebody find me the person who came up with that idea. I’ll get the horsewhip.

Now here’s my thought. Why not keep the journey times the same but make the trains so comfortable and relaxing that people won’t want the trip to end? Instead, they could pass the time staring out the window at all the gleaming hospitals, schools, playing fields, and gorgeously maintained countryside that the billions of saved pounds had paid for. Alternatively, you could just put a steam locomotive on front of the train, make all the seats inside wooden, and have it run entirely by volunteers. People would come from all over the country to ride on it.

In either case, if any money was left over, perhaps a little of it could be used to fit trains with toilets that don’t flush directly onto the tracks, so that when I sit on a platform at a place like Cambridge or Oxford glumly eating a WHSmith sandwich I don’t have to watch blackbirds fighting over tattered fragments of human waste and toilet paper. It is, let’s face it, hard enough to eat a WHSmith sandwich as it is.

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The last time I was in Birmingham was in 2008 when CPRE launched an anti-litter campaign called Stop the Drop and sent me to all three main political parties’ annual conferences to try to drum up support. It was a strange experience. I went first to Bournemouth and talked to a small group of delegates from the Liberal Democrats Party. It was so small a group, in fact, that we could have held the meeting in the hotel elevator and still had room for the sandwich cart.

Then I went to Manchester for a breakfast with Labour Party members, but nobody turned up—honestly, not one person—so that was a magnificent failure, although we did get to take a lot of doughnuts home.

That left just the Conservatives in Birmingham. They gave us a slot in the conference hall itself, which seemed much more encouraging. This was my chance not only to address the Tory faithful, but the whole nation on television, so I worked really hard on my speech. On the day itself, I went to the conference center in Birmingham, was dusted lavishly with makeup, and positioned in the wings. When I was introduced, I strode onto the stage to the lightest applause ever heard in a public place. There were only about thirty people in the auditorium. Six were conspicuously asleep and the rest, I think, were dead. I was sorely tempted to say: “Shall I start now or shall we wait for the body bags to get here?” I gave my speech and departed without disturbing any of those who were still breathing. I learned later that that’s the way party conferences always are. The only time the seats fill is when the leader speaks.

Afterward I walked back to the station through Victoria Square and up New Street, all now cozily pedestrianized. I couldn’t believe how improved the city was. It occurred to me then that I should come back one day and have a better look. Now was that day.

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The first time I came to Birmingham, I had never seen a city that was this ugly on purpose. Where I came from there was plenty of ugliness, but it was mostly accidental. Birmingham seemed designed to be ugly. The chief culprit was a man named Sir Herbert Manzoni, city engineer from 1935 to 1963, who thought old buildings “more sentimental than valuable,” and wanted to build an entirely new Birmingham. He is the man who filled the city with inner-ring roads, dank pedestrian tunnels, massive transportation interchanges, and brutalist tower blocks—in short, made Birmingham as soulless and dispiriting a place as you could find.

The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a fascinating room devoted to Manzoni’s vision. It contains a giant scale model of a proposed civic quarter in a style that might be called Canberra Meets Nazi Nuremberg. On the walls overlooking the model are visionary drawings, beautifully drafted, showing parklike expressways cutting through the city, lined on both sides with avenues of high-rise public housing, all surrounded by lots of greenery. A good deal of it actually looks quite exciting. The problem is that most of it was never built and the parts that were built didn’t gleam for long. Within twenty-five years more than two hundred council-owned tower blocks had serious structural problems, and most have since been torn down.

In the process of making a new Birmingham, Manzoni demolished many of the city’s best buildings, but mercifully he spared the Museum and Art Gallery. Built in 1885, it remains a magnificent institution, with room after room of treasures, including the largest collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings of any museum in the world. It also now includes the recently discovered Staffordshire Hoard, an Anglo-Saxon haul found buried just inches beneath the surface on a farm near Lichfield in 2009. And it has the best and most stylish museum café in the universe. I spent a happy couple of hours prowling through its many galleries, then went out and had a good tramp through the city, impressed by its improvements.

Birmingham really has made great strides in restoring itself to agreeableness, but I am afraid those days are coming to an end. Just after my visit, the Age of Austerity caught up with the city in a big way as the council announced massive spending cuts. Under the new plans, two-thirds of city employees will be made redundant. The new £189 million central library, opened in 2013, will have its staffing levels halved and its opening hours reduced from seventy-three a week to forty. Across the city, football fields and play areas will be closed. CCTV cameras will no longer be monitored continuously. Birmingham, instead of becoming a greener, cleaner, more congenial place, will be dowdier, dirtier, and more unsafe. I love a city with vision.

All of this is being done to save £338 million over four years. That sounds like an enormous and urgent sum, but in fact it is a saving of about £1.40 per week per citizen. I wonder what all those lucky people of Birmingham will do with that extra £1.40 flowing into their pockets every week. Perhaps they can use it to enjoy those extra twenty minutes their faster train journeys will bring them.

Oh, thank you, Government of Britain, thank you for enriching us all.

II

I went to Ironbridge, a village in Shropshire so proud of its most prominent structure that it named itself after it. And it is a very fine structure, it must be said. It was the first iron bridge in the world—the first substantial iron anything.

The bridge and the iron industry that made it possible were the work of three generations of men all named Abraham Darby. The first Abraham Darby was a Quaker businessman who came to Coalbrookdale, as Ironbridge was then known, in about 1706 with a plan to make better cooking pots. He had devised a way to smelt iron with coke instead of charcoal, which gave a hotter flame and produced a better product. His son and grandson, Abrahams II and III, extended the business, built several powerful blast furnaces, made enormous volumes of cast iron, and were generally the fathers of England’s industrial revolution. It was Abraham III who built the iron bridge as a way of demonstrating the firm’s ingenuity and promise. So the Darbys not only gave the world the age of iron and steel, but also modern marketing.

For the design of the bridge, Abraham Darby III turned to a local man named Thomas Pritchard, who was a decidedly curious choice. Pritchard had no training in engineering or architecture. He was a joiner by trade, though in recent years he had started to do a little conceptual work as well. He had designed and built a couple of churches and even one bridge, albeit comparatively small and made of wood. He had never done anything monumental with cast iron, but then of course no one had. Pritchard proved an inspired choice—in fact, much more than that, for his bridge is one of the great structures of the age. It is at once elegant and decorous, yet wholly utilitarian. Every bit of it has a purpose and yet it is endlessly agreeable to look at, too. Indeed, as I learned now, you simply can’t take your eyes off it. It is nearly impossible, I think, to resist the urge to walk over it and around it and to view it from as many angles as you can contrive. It is, in short, gloriously, uniquely arresting. Poor Pritchard never got to see it at all. He died of some sudden but unrecorded misfortune two days before Christmas 1777, only a month after work started and nearly four years before the bridge was finished. He was fifty-four years old.

Ironbridge is an unexpectedly serene and pretty village on the side of a steep, wooded ravine above the River Severn. Though it clearly exists these days to serve tourists, it does so rather more stylishly than it has any need to. The shops are interesting and attractive, and the cafés and guesthouses looked pretty good, too. I had an excellent cup of coffee (with a free small biscuit—always much appreciated), then strode around the shops and looked in a few windows. I might well have bought a sofa cushion or lap rug were it not that Mrs. Bryson already has very substantial collections of each. I have on occasion been astonished to discover in our house that if you dig through piles of cushions and blankets you sometimes find a sofa or bed underneath. At the bottom of the village was a pub called the White Hart Inn, which had a signboard out front stating that you could come in and use the toilets without buying anything—a statement so kind and agreeable and unique that I instantly made it my favorite pub in Shropshire, and Ironbridge my favorite community.

A mile or so along the valley from the bridge is the spot where the Darby furnaces formerly blazed—where the industrial revolution began really. This district, once a permanently glowing hellhole, is now a picturesque cluster of preserved buildings, dominated by a large brick factory that is now a museum. Entrance was £9.25, but I got a pound off, to my quiet satisfaction, for being a qualified elderly person. I was further gratified to discover that the ticket also included admission to the “Darby homes,” whatever exactly they were. The ticket man suggested that I should start there because the museum had just admitted three busloads of schoolchildren who would spend the next twenty or thirty minutes racing everywhere before being rounded up by harried teachers, and guided into a special area where they would eat their packed lunches.

I thanked the man for this consideration and strolled across the grounds to the Darby homes a couple of hundred yards away. These proved to be a pair of eighteenth-century houses built by the Darby family so that they could keep an eye on the factories outside the windows. The houses were pleasantly furnished and gave a reasonable idea of what life must have been like for the original inhabitants, minus the smoke and soot and earth-shaking vibrations that they must have lived with when this was a factory site. On a table in a parlor, left for the casual perusal of visitors, was a book by Arthur Raistrick called
Quakers in Science and Industry
and I glanced through it for a few minutes, then carried it to a nearby chair and sat reading for about half an hour, so unexpectedly absorbed did I become. I hadn’t realized it, but Quakers in the Darbys’ day were a bullied and downtrodden minority in Britain. Excluded from conventional pursuits like politics and academia, they became big in industry and commerce, particularly, for some reason, in banking and the manufacture of chocolate. The Barclays and Lloyds banking families and the Cadburys, Frys, and Rowntrees of chocolate renown were all Quakers. They and many others made Britain a more dynamic and wealthy place entirely as a consequence of being treated shabbily by it. It had never occurred to me to be unkind to a Quaker, but if that’s what it takes to get the country back on its feet again, I am prepared to consider it.

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Between the Darby houses and the museum stands the Old Furnace, as it is known—the spot where the very first spark of the industrial revolution was struck. As recently as the 1950s, the importance of the Darby works was almost forgotten. The Old Furnace lay hidden under decades of accumulated soil and rubble, and had to be excavated, with brush and trowel, like a Roman villa. Today things couldn’t be more different. The furnace is sheltered from the elements inside a stylish glass-fronted structure. Inside, a guide was conducting a party of a dozen or so people around. It has become a treasured shrine, though I have to say to me it just looked like any old furnace. I eavesdropped on the guide’s lecture as closely as I could while of course pretending not to—I affected a close interest in some loose pointing just beside him—but the talk was way too technical for me.

Realizing I required more knowledge if I was ever going to appreciate the steel industry, I went across to the museum proper, and there I learned a great deal about wet puddling, dry puddling, smelting, and Bessemer processes, all of which went into my head and straight out again, like water through a pipe, so that although I learned nothing at all from the experience I felt strangely cleansed by it. The museum also contained a large collection of cast-iron objects—dining chairs, garden furniture, decorative tables, stoves, kitchen equipment, even serving bowls. Much of it was really quite splendid.