by Bill Bryson
I found my way back to the village. The shop was closed for the afternoon and there was no one around to ask for guidance. According to an information board nearby, the village was mostly owned by Oxford University and the villagers were mostly tenants, so all this seemed a little unnecessarily unfriendly, I have to say. Later I learned from an acquaintance who lives in Oxford that Wytham Woods isn’t really open to the public. They may not Taser you, as they might in California, but they don’t exactly welcome you with open arms on to the land. Then it occurred to me that if they are doing careful studies up there, if they have nesting boxes and traps and the like scattered about, they can’t really have people with their dogs and mountain bikes disturbing things, so I forgave them in the name of science.
Besides, it was half past five, nearly cocktail hour, so I strolled back to Wolvercote and had a drink at the Trout, where Inspector Morse and his trusty sidekick Lewis often went for alcoholic refreshment and inspiration while solving one of Oxford’s many murders. I once met Colin Dexter, the donnish creator of the Morse series, and asked him how many murders he was personally responsible for.
‘Sixty-eight!’ he answered proudly. He also told me that the number of murders that he had contrived for a dozen mystery novels was several times greater than the number of actual murders in Oxford in the same period. The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be. I looked into this once and found that statistically a Briton is more likely to die by almost any other means – including accidentally walking into a wall – than to be murdered.
And if that’s not a happy thought, I don’t know what is.
Chapter 17
The Midlands
I
I RECENTLY BOUGHT a new laptop. It came loaded with some software – I think it is called Microsoft Gestapo – that lets them enter the computer at any time of the day or night, line everyone up against the wall and install some new software. I don’t know what this new software does or why they didn’t think to put it in in the factory, but it sure is important to them to get it in there now. About every second time I fire up the computer, I get a message that says: ‘Updates are ready for your computer. Would you like to install now (now is recommended) or be reminded every fifteen seconds for the rest of eternity?’
At first I submitted, but the updates took for ever to load and they didn’t make any detectable difference to the quality of my life, so eventually I tried to subvert the process by switching my computer off and then on again. Take it from me right now, you should never do that. The next message I got said: ‘Resuming installation process. Do not ever try anything like that again. Remember: we know that you spent a whole afternoon on March 10 watching Paris Hilton home videos. We’ll tell your wife. We’re Microsoft. Don’t fuck with us. Download will be complete in 14 hours.’
So when I got an update notification now, as I sat on a train from London to Birmingham, I just stoically accepted and gave up the hope of doing any work for a while. Instead I had a look at the three strangers sitting with me at a snug little table. They were all dressed for work, but none of them were working either, as far as I could tell. The man beside me was watching a movie – I bet his boss didn’t know that – and it wasn’t even a good movie. I could tell because it had a lot of explosions and starred Liam Neeson. The two people opposite held smartphones like little prayer books, transfixed by what they found on their screens. Nearly everyone else within sight was holding a phone and doing rapid things with their thumbs. Two young men who had evidently not mastered the use of their thumbs were asleep with earphones in. Only one man with a laptop and a document seemed to be engaged in paid labour.
All this was of interest to me because this was the very train line that the government wanted to replace with a new high speed operation known as HS2, in an effort to make the nation more economically vibrant. The idea was that by getting people to Birmingham twenty minutes quicker, they could get more work done and all those extra twenty minutes would collectively translate into gazillions of extra pounds for the economy. I am a little dubious about this myself because I think that if you give anyone anywhere an extra twenty minutes, they will just have a cup of coffee. It’s what you and I would do. It’s what anyone does with twenty minutes.
The people who are opposed to HS2 argue that there is no need to get people to Birmingham quicker anyway because they can work on the train. But, as my carriage mates were demonstrating, people don’t actually work on trains. In fact, I am not sure they work at all any more.
Not long before this, my wife and I ordered a sofa from a shop on the Fulham Road in London, and on a Saturday in May, just before the May Day bank holiday, we travelled all the way into London from Hampshire to complete the paperwork. When we got to the shop, we found three other couples standing outside. The door was locked and the interior in darkness. This was at 10 am on a Saturday morning, thirty minutes after the posted opening time. We all took turns peering through the glass door, as if one of us might spot something that the others had missed. There was no sign in the window to indicate why the shop was shut. People with smartphones activated their thumbs and reported that there was no notice on the shop’s website. One man rang the shop, and we could hear the ringing inside, but obviously there was no one there to answer it. After about twenty or twenty-five minutes, we all gave up and wandered off. Three days later, curious as to what had happened, I called the shop for an explanation.
‘Oh, yah,’ said a young woman with a posh voice, ‘we shut for the bank holiday.’
‘But Saturday wasn’t a bank holiday. The bank holiday was Monday.’
‘Yah, we shut for the weekend.’
‘But you didn’t put a sign in the window or a notice on your website. You just left a bunch of people standing there like idiots.’
‘Oom, yah,’ she said as if that were an interesting but pointless observation, and I realized that she was almost certainly doing her nails or reading emails.
‘Well, you know what, you are a spoiled, brainless fuckhead,’ I said. Actually I didn’t say that at all. I just thought it. Instead I muttered some pathetic lamentation, in the British style, and hung up. In the end, you just give up or move to another country.
I truly don’t understand how Britain does it. Great Britain has the world’s sixth largest economy, but as far as I can see it doesn’t make much of anything any more. Whitbread doesn’t brew beer. Tate & Lyle no longer refines sugar. Only five of Britain’s largest companies manufacture any products at all in the UK now. So few industrial companies are left that the Financial Times had to take the word ‘industrial’ out of the Financial Times Industrial Average, its principal measure of corporate well-being. When I was a child, Britain made a quarter of all that was produced in the world (though, to be fair, my being a child had very little to do with it); now the figure is 2.9 per cent and falling. These days, Britain makes Rolls-Royce jet engines and all the little pots of marmalade in the world, but that’s about it, as far as I can tell.
Nearly everything that’s left seems to be owned by foreigners. French companies own Hamley’s toy store, Glenmorangie whisky, Orange mobile phones, Fisons pharmaceuticals and EDF, the power company. E.ON and Npower are German. Scottish Power is Spanish. United Biscuits, which makes McVitie’s Digestives, Jaffa Cakes and Hula Hoops, is owned by Yildiz, a Turkish company. Jaguar, Blue Circle Cement, British Steel, Harrods, Bass breweries, most of the main airports, several of the most important football teams, and the company that brought you this book are all foreign owned. Fewer than half of Britain’s largest companies even have a British-born chairman.
HP and Daddies sauces are made in Holland. Smarties are made in Germany. Raleigh bicycles are made in Denmark. In 2010, RBS, a failed Scottish bank owned by the British government, lent the money to the American food conglomerate Kraft to buy Cadbury’s, Britain’s most venerable chocolate maker. As part of the deal Kraft promised to keep ope
n a Cadbury factory near Bristol, but it was just fooling. As soon as the deal was complete, Kraft closed the factory and shipped its machinery to Poland.
I think these things matter. People used to be proud of what Britain gave the world, but now they can’t even be sure of what it gives itself. If you sell out to outsiders, you must accept that it will be people from other lands who decide what biscuits you eat, where your sauces are concocted, whether your banks have locally meaningful names like ‘Britannia’ and ‘Halifax’ or are named after some Spanish city that no one has ever been to and has 40 per cent unemployment.
And yet the country thrives. It’s a miracle. How does it do it? I have no idea. All I can say is that it isn’t by working hard on trains.
I am fascinated by HS2. The whole idea is so mad that you have to, as it were, step back and walk all the way around it to take it in. To begin with, there is the projected cost. It began at about £17 billion, I believe, and the last I saw was up to £42 billion, but I am sure it is much higher now, because the costs of these big projects always inflate faster than anyone can type the numbers. The only certainty with large projects is that no one can ever predict anything with certainty. Eurotunnel cost twice as much to build as expected and attracted half as many people as predicted. HS1, older sibling to HS2, was confidently forecast to carry 25 million passengers by 2006. In fact, it has never reached half that number and I have never heard anyone boasting about the economic vitality it has brought to Ashford or Ebbsfleet.
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 of the countryside. A high-speed rail line offers nothing in the way of charm. It is a motorway for trains. 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 marvellous, then perhaps that would be a justifiable price to pay, but a fast train to Birmingham is never going to be marvellous. 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 to. Passengers from the north who need to get to Heathrow will have to change trains at 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 Europe, they will have to get off at Euston station and make their way half a mile along the Euston Road to St Pancras. It has actually been suggested that travelators could be installed for that journey. Can you imagine travelling half a mile on travelators? Somebody find me the person who came up with that notion. I’ll get the horsewhip.
Now here’s my idea. 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 in 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 on to the tracks, so that when I sit on a platform at a place like Cambridge or Oxford glumly eating a WH Smith 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 WH Smith sandwich as it is.
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 party conferences to try to drum up support. It was a strange experience. I went first to Bournemouth and talked to a small group of Lib Dems – so small, in fact, that we could have held the meeting in the hotel lift and still had room for the sandwich trolley, but in 2008 the Lib Dems were hopelessly inconsequential (people forget that that is essentially their default mode), so it didn’t greatly matter.
Then I went to Manchester for a breakfast with Labour MPs, 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 at the conference 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 centre in Birmingham, was dusted lavishly with make-up and positioned in the wings. When I was introduced, I strode on to 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.
Afterwards I walked back to the station through Victoria Square and up New Street, all now cosily 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.
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. This looked built to be ugly, and indeed it was. The 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 subways, massive transport interchanges and brutalist tower blocks – in short, made Birmingham as horrible a place as you could find.
At the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery there is a fascinating room devoted to Manzoni’s vision. It contains a giant 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 motorways 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 tower blocks had serious structural problems, and most have since been torn down.
Manzoni demolished many of Birmingham’s best buildings, but mercifully spared the Museum and Art Gallery. It remains a most wonderful institution, with room after room of treasures, including some of the best Pre-Raphaelite art in the country. 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 pitches 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.
