The Need for Speed

A slight departure from the subject of architecture this week because surfing the BBC website during the week, I learned that this is the week of the 75th anniversary of Mallard’s world record run where 126mph was recorded near Grantham, Lincolnshire on 3rd July 1938 a record that still stands as a world record for steam traction, and a reminder that I was mad on trains as a kid.

Mallard? not a duck but a steam locomotive named after it designed by Sir Nigel Gresley, distinctive by its steamlined body shape. To mark the anniversary Mallard and the five remaining sisters have been reunited, a reunion that involved shipping two from the US and Canada, and suddenly it seems it is cool to be interested in trains again,  if only for a short time. For the numbers already flocking to the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York, most of this summer’s ticketed events are already sold out this probably represents a once in a lifetime opportunity to view these impressive machines in the same place. The theme of the exhibition as shown on the NRM website is understandably about the quest for speed.

Considering where I am writing this, Bahrain, a country yet to posses a railway, interest in trains must seem strange if not a little absurd. What is it that draws the huge numbers of people to a gathering of machines? The love of steam? A romantic view of travel in the 1930’s perhaps? are they really celebrating visions of how life was much simpler in those days, no television, no computers, few cars, few telephones, along with smog, poor air quality and health problems as the whole country ran on coal. Travel was concentrated on summer excursions to the seaside...Blackpool, Skegness, The English Riviera, by train naturally.

For me it is about something else entirely, it is about national identity, and the period in history probably represents Britishness at its height, regarded as world leaders, the names of two of those locomotives in the exhibition a standing testament to the sprit of the age. ‘Union of South Africa’ and ‘Dominion of Canada’ the two living reminders of the Empire, when everything was wonderful (at least from a British point of view), one fifth of the globe was coloured pink, and represented a well behaved world governed by the British, through colonies, protectorates and dominions, with progress considered to be in the name of the common good regardless of consequences. Tea came from Yorkshire, chocolate from Bourneville, the origins of those products idealised on the packaging.

Birmingham was considered the workshop of the world, Liverpool was the city of trade, receiving goods and passengers from all around the world, Manchester supplied the world with textiles, the best Steel came from Sheffield and the railway was the vital lifeline that held it all together. The year 1938 represents Great Britain at its height, a year before the outbreak of WWII, when Britain was last considered ‘Great’ and the future looked bright. Six years later ‘British Made’ no longer had the same meaning, and so started the trend of importing goods made far more cheaply in South East Asia, and with it the decline of industry in Britain.

75 years later are we celebrating advances in engineering of are we lamenting the loss of something quite different?