"Use Your Loaf!"
or
"The Powers of Progress"
Prologue
“By doing so, we shall in course of time,
Regenerate completely our entire land”
-------------------------------
Birmingham: At the Center of Britain's Economic Rebuilding
by Gabe Capell
22nd February 1954
Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Aerodrome is a unique structure in many ways. Quite apart from it being it the main aerial transport hub for fights into Great Britain, it also the only equivalent structure in the entire country to be named after a politician.
Britons don’t tend to idealize even their most successful mediaeval kings with in such a way, so it is a mark of Birmingham’s high regard for their former Mayor that they have commemorated his name in their largest building project of the post-war period.
The aerodrome is a world away from the shabby ones that I remember landing at on my previous visits to the country. Arriving at Northolt, some hundred or so miles to the southeast, fifteen years ago, I was greeted by herd of stray cattle that had wondered onto the landing strip.
There is little sign of such bovine misdemeanours happening in the sleek surroundings of the newly inaugurated terminal building. With the crescent-moon shaped roof stretching hundreds of feet above and behind me, I feel as if I am standing in a technocratic cathedral to the New Britain.
Of course, I muse as my bespectacled handler walks towards me, that is quite obviously the intention.
Merry Rees, as the young civil servant introduces himself, requests that I follow him to the waiting automobile. I am disappointed, readers will no doubt be aware of the ‘Linmo’ connecting the aerodrome building to the city centre. Having wanted to take the journey for some time now, I enquire as to the possibility of us using it instead.
Mr Rees smiles and shakes his head. It isn’t a suitable way for the government to treat an honored reporter, he tells me. Besides, he continues, the aesthetics of the sleek dual-track of the line is better appreciated from the highway.
Disappointed, I follow my new colleague through the cavernous arrivals hall. We are waved through customs, much to the chagrin of my fellow passengers, who must endure a bureaucracy that seems pleasantly resistant to mechanization.
An enveloping canopy covers the freeway outside the terminal proper, so I pay little heed to the rain that has been pursuing our flight since the mid-Atlantic. Mr Rees holds the automobile’s door for me, and we are soon speeding towards the City of Birmingham. Typically, the steel track above us immediately snakes away at a perpendicular angle to the road and it is soon out of my sight. I get the impression that this is one of Mr Rees’ small personal victories, something to break the monotony of chauffeuring around foreign reporters.
The journey is a rapid one, rather unimpeded by traffic, but it still leaves me enough time to see the way in which the municipal planners are attempting to transform the urban landscape into one befitting a European capital.
Because Birmingham
is a capital, despite all attempts by the government to insist on prefixing everything with “interim’” in vain attempt to plaster over the actual reason for it being the new seat of power. Were one not aware of recent and not-so-recent political matters, one would be forgiven for thinking that London was simply beset by a bad case of Bavarian Measles.
The architects do seem to be doing well though, despite the nominally short-lived nature of their remit. Wide boulevards have replaced the meandering chaos that the old layout of the city, thousands of commuters travel underneath us in the new Metro, carelessly avoiding looking at the monuments and ministries that have replaced the industrial plants that used to dominate this part of the country.
We rejoin the Linmo as it enters Queensway Station, the main railroad artery to the rest of the country. The nearby terminus at St Martin’s Square is hardly used by the general public. Asking where the incoming locomotive has come from, Mr Rees reels off one of the unpronounceable gurgles that is a substitute for a proper place name in that part of the world.
I am informed that St Martin’s is on the mainline for the locomotives bringing back coffins from Gwynedd, Brittany and the other occupation areas that seem to be a perpetual drain for this nation’s demographics. I clam up for the next couple of minutes, I get the feeling that Rees has a personal connection to this.
A short while longer, after passing the official memorial to ‘Radical Joe’ opposite the Municipal Hall, we come to a halt outside the austere edifice of the Ministry for National Reconstruction, one of the many vast new structures that have begun to dominate the Birmingham skyline. Certain readers may be aware of the recent humiliation in the Georgia Senate last month, when designs for the new British Interior Ministry Complex were mistakenly used in place of plans for the new State Congress. Chuckling to myself at the recent memory, I hardly notice as we drive into the vast underground autopark.
An hour later, I am in the clinical office of Earl Slim, the new Minister. The patrician gentleman, one of a handful of peers in the new administration, actually seems the first person who is happy to see me since the Sommelier presented me with an overpriced glass of Merlot somewhere over Iceland.
Slim is a Birmingham native himself, and seems only happy to answer my questions about the rebuilding of the capital. I sense that he would be only too happy to have the city retain that position for the foreseeable future. Many citizens still talk in begrudging terms about “the South’s War” and the resulting chaos and expense that has resulted.
Yet the cynic in me feels that the same people would be downcast if they lacked the prestige that the conflict has awarded them. Back in the 1870s, Joseph Chamberlain transformed the city that now deifies him, taking unity firms into public ownership, clearing away slum housing and promoting a radical program of urban renewal that still seems to be unmatched by his political heirs in the City Council Chambers across the road.
Slim talks with the easy confidence of a man confident that his career has peaked at just the right time, a former army officer turned politician, reconstruction seems a natural home for a figure who prides himself on organizational skills and mass mobilization of human capital.
It is all terribly socialist of course, but Slim’s idol, whose statue stares impassively across the square outside, could quite easily fit such a description as well. Handing me a proposal plan of the new Birmingham, he encourages me to “get it framed” before, eyes twinkling, he beckons me to leave him as we make to to leave his generously apportioned office.
We spend the rest of the day touring construction projects. Slim is eager to point out the developing landmarks; the new “interim” Parliament building, a vast new concert hall and St Vincent’s Soccer Stadium where the final game of next year’s World Series is to be held. Everything seems endemic of a system finding a new purpose for a city that used to be entirely regional in outlook.
Perhaps most impressive, certainly for someone like myself raised near shipyards, is the complex system of canal docks that has already gained the colloquial term “Spaghetti Basin” from the locals. Watching the huge cranes unload their various wares from across the ocean, I feel I could make my way to my next stop by just walking across the roofs of the many cargo barges waiting for their turn in line.
We end the day atop ‘Old Joe,’ the clock tower that dominates the original university campus. Like anything of a certain age in this city, it owes a heritage to Joseph Chamberlain, a man responsible for establishing the college as a seat of learning at the start of the century.
It’s a pleasant evening, despite the February cold, and I am quite content to stay there for the duration, marvelling in the illustrious capabilities of Birmingham’s population. Slim leaves me with an apologetic wave, leaving to meet an Ambassador, and Mr Rees, for once, keeps his distance.
Soon enough however, the winds pick up enough to force me from my windswept perch by the clock-face, and we take the reassuringly smooth elevator back down to ground level.
Tomorrow, I am supposed to be heading off towards Powys in order to interview the regional army commander, but according to my handler, the security situation there seems to have worsened. Rees again seems reassured by this, hoping against hope that I’ll bid an early farewell to this uneasy country, but I politely inform him that I am not be dissuaded. To my surprise, he nods at me and I feel that I have passed some sort of challenge.
We head back into Birmingham, my luggage having been delivered to one of the few hotels deemed “suitable” for foreigners. Crossing back over one of the city’s many canals, I note another train gliding silently into St Martin’s Station.
This time, I don’t ask where it’s come from.
