God is a can of beans

I was always impressed by factories, manufacturing plant, infrastructure.  Though I remember feeling vaguely terrified, on leaving school, at the prospect of entering the complex over the railway bridge from my nan’s house.  It was screened on one side by trees and a car park, but the trees didn’t stop the whistle and bark of shunting engines sending a portend of what might lie beyond.  I pictured myself in a vast room filled with moving machinery of a kind I could only imagine.

The reality, when it came, exceeded the vision.

It was like living inside a child’s animated toy, surrounded by reciprocating and whirling parts – like a monstrous, but fascinating fairground.  Whole buildings were really giant machines.  Enormously scaled-up versions of a Meccano or chemistry set, whose floors and ceilings reverberated with the movement of materials, products or fuel.  Men stood like sentinels on the footplates of electric trucks hauling long trains of goods along endless metallic tunnels.  A plant might comprise a dozen such buildings, forming an unfathomable metasystem – human ingenuity on a grand scale.

The Thompson Boiler House contained four gigantic boilers, quartered into multiple levels of mezzanines and gangways, each boiler having a moving roadway constantly spilling tons of coal into the furnaces.  Large electric motors contributed to the general din, driving conveyors, water pumps and fans.  Wet cinders poured constantly from a chute onto a pile at the rear of the building.  Grey smoke belched from the chimneys.  Dante’s workplace.  I was seventeen and a half the first time I carried a tool-bag into there.

Warning!  Wear ear protection!  The need to shout above the industrial din placed you in immediate awe of where you were.  I haven’t found anything else that impresses me in that way.  Large passenger aircraft with their complexity integrated into a seemingly simple whole, perhaps, but the complexity doesn’t reveal itself except to Row 24A and F at take-off and landing.

When the industrial landscape began to vanish, I felt its loss in an almost physical sense.  I was bereft.  And I’ve found nothing to replace the machinery.  Colleges, universities, call-centres, meeting-rooms, classrooms: none have the ability to awe. 

It might be argued that the digitization of human life provides a comparable expression of ingenuity and confidence, but it doesn’t have the same physical presence.  It doesn’t impose itself on the landscape, or form an environment for the human hamster in the wheel – which reads like a nightmare, until it’s gone.

So where does that leave us?  Well, it leaves me with a big empty hole. 

Feel free to shrug and move on. 

It takes all kinds.