The Wiki Man

20 June 2009

Whenever you make an optimistic prediction, you risk being wrong twice.

Of significance to Britain is that our mania for building fast roads arose late and yet ended early. After only a few years, enthusiasm for multi-lane roads came to seem provincial and gauche. As Moran neatly observes, ‘Birmingham’s biggest image problem was that it kept hymning the praises of its road system long after urban motorways had ceased to have any utopian associations.’ Other places were no better; the slogan ‘Leeds: Motorway City of the Seventies’ can’t have been much of a lure even when first written.

Yet reading this book still leaves me pitying Britain’s civil engineers and builders, whose often heroic work is now viewed as a necessary evil at best — while journalists herald a slightly smaller iPod as a marvel. Nobody loves electronic shiny things more than I do, but I sometimes wonder whether we invest all our hopes in electronics simply because in a cynical, querulous, crowded democracy, the pain of doing anything big has become too great. In France, the government can earn brownie points from grands projets; here they are ignored unless they fail.

The cynical answer, if he continues his upward trajectory, is to buy Nick Griffin off with the transport ministry in ten years’ time. He is patently thick-skinned. Moreover, judging by pre-war Italy (where there were even plans to turn the Grand Canal in Venice into a six-lane expressway) fascists have a knack for that kind of thing.