online: 4 september 2010 modified: 14, 15 august, 4, 5, 11, 12 september 2010 14 august 2010 after the early days
in the expanding present
...and after finding a new way to perceive my work in the decade of the 1950s (attempting to re-shape and to humanise the external parts of electrical engineering equipment at AEI Ltd... formerly the Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company, Manchester)... as more significant than i thought at the time...
...now recovering in Sun Luen cafe (eating red bean slices and drinking green tea)... after failing to enjoy a visit to Foyles bookshop... and the second-hand bookshops in Charing Cross Road amidst crowds among whom today i feel hassled... and forced to breathe damp air in poor ventilation amongst bookstacks... and the lack of seats etc...
...and today i'm not enjoying the books i used to like...even two new selected writings and interpretations of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens...
...but in this simple cafe (with the street door open and everyone speaking Chinese) the air is cool and the intercultural atmosphere is pleasant (as usual)... and now i'm feeling alive to be writing this... (and all seems well again... or almost)...
...this is the cafe where they started to teach me Chinese writing... or at least a few pictograms...
...someone was singing in a quiet voice behind me... and now the same voice speaks as if to itself while it's owner eats or drinks... and while i am writing to myself... and also writing to anyone who finds this on the web...small pieces of the world, past and present, addressing or enchanting each other now and then...
...what surprises and pleases me now is the memory of those early days... my surprise is that so few of us* could have any influence at all on what i yesterday described as 'that vast industrial complex'** of Trafford Park Manchester during the 1950s... not that we did much... but what we proposed and the engineers did (if they agreed or were persuaded) became what i now think of as minor miracle of voluntary art amongst industry...
...and can we now redo or repeat any of this as well informed post-industrial idealism of the present?... (in which what is past can re-exist in a fuller and happier extension of that tiny miracle of semi-public-mind-changing... and world-changing)... is that what is needed now... amidst the growing pains of the new... that may at last become a more human future... not previously attainable...
(this is clear in my mind but i think it's not yet evident to many others)...
...so!...on my way back to the city forest i will try to see all this as a new kind of fiction... not a romantic novel (as the imagined lives of a few)... but as a collective vision or romance (of an imaginary culture of everyone-plus-new-technology)... as a better way to live...
*the people involved in that unique performance at AEI were Harry West and Charles Flurscheim (succesive directors of engineering), Rupert M Kay (industrial design engineer), Jack Howe (industrial design consultant), myself (assistant industrial design engineer and later ergonomics engineer)... variously assisted by Ray Gray and a series of graduate apprentices... all of us of very different origins but united in this cause of 'industrial design' as it is so ambiguously called... (and is still an unknown art except to those who apply it)... not to mention the hundreds of engineering designers and draughtsmen who were persuaded to take part in this alteration of their imaginative yet invisible work, rarely recognised as a primary art of our time...
** here are some of my notes for a film about the work of Jack Howe that is being made by his daughter Susan Wright:
I THINK THAT THE INFLUENCE OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ON BRITISH HEAVY ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING INDUSTRY REACHED A PEAK IN THE WORK OF JACK HOWE AND THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGN OFFICE AT TRAFFORD PARK... at the request of Harry West
(HARRY WEST WAS AN EX TRADE APPRENTICE WHO BECAME CHIEF ENGINEER OF THE A.C. MOTORS DEPARTMENT... AND LATER HE BECAME DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING
HE DIRECTED ABOUT 20 DESIGN DEPARTMENTS EACH WITH A CHIEF ENGINEER WHO WAS QUITE A POWER IN THE LAND)....
...THE DEPARTMENTS VARIED FROM TURBO GENERATORS, HIGH VOLTAGE SWITCHGEAR, TRANSFORMERS, MOTORS AND ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVES... TO RADAR, COMPUTERS, ELECTRON MICROSCOPES AND NUCLEAR MAGNETIC RESONANCE SPECTROMETERS... AND EVEN A RADIO TELESCOPE... I THINK THERE WAS NO OTHER COMPANY IN THE UK CAPABLE OF DESIGNING AND MAKING THIS RANGE OF ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT
HARRY WEST INITIATED INDUSTRIAL DESIGN IN THE COMPANY - (PERHAPS AT THE PERSUASION OF R M KAY WHO HAD WORKED IN THE PUBLICITY DEPARTMENT DURING THE 1930s AND WAS AN ACTIVE MEMBER OF THE DESGIN AND INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION)
JACK HOWE AND THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGN OFFICE COULD ONLY ADVISE THE CHIEF ENGINEERS AND CHIEF DRAUGHTSMEN - WHO WERE NOT OBLIGED TO ACCEPT THEIR ADVICE...
...SOMETIMES THAT SEEMED A FATAL LIMITATION BUT IN RETROSPECT IT SEEMS TO ME QUITE MARVELLOUS THAT SUCH MODEST SEMI-VOLUNTARY EFFORTS... BY SO FEW PEOPLE... HAD ANY EFFECT AT ALL ON THAT VAST INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!... (that such a thing was possible)...
AND THEN CAME MRS THATCHER, HER ALLY ARNOLD WEINSTOCK, AND THE TAKEOVER BY HIS GEC WHICH ENDED AEI AND ALL THIS...
after which that vast asset was closed down and the whole place... which employed 25,000 highly skilled people including thousands of trainees... a training school... and a respected laboratory of applied scientists... all of whom have gone and the buildings have been 'reduced to warehouses'...
...i've now returned to a perhaps dangerously over-crowded underground station and train... in which a young Chinese woman gives me her seat... i wonder (as often) at the acceptance by all of us of these sub-human conditions... in this half-human yet half-deadly way of living with machines...
...and now i realise we are entering the section of this Piccadilly Line in which were exploded several bombs that destroyed many people (including the bombers) in what's now called 7/7 the suicide bombing of several years ago
...i wasn't thinking of this when i set out... and while writing about it i missed the next station... and now i'm back in the Caledonian Road where i lived for 15 years... so i go out briefly to have a look at it... and find a new block of flats for community housing and two small supermarkets... what before was a piece of wasteland has become a new growth of the inner city and an affordable home for many people... (i feel half-attracted to it myself)...
for comfortable line length please set the window to about half of the screen width
You may transmit this text to anyone for any non-commercial
purpose if you include the copyright line and this notice and if you
respect the copyright of quotations.
If you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please
send a copyright permission request to jcj 'at' publicwriting.net
(replace 'at' and spaces by the @ sign)
