UK - Engineering revival

[John Ashworth]

Engineering revival

A better Olympic legacy for east London would be a return to its great manufacturing tradition

Jonathan Glancey
The Guardian, Friday 20 February 2009

At York station yesterday, the Prince of Wales unveiled the nameplate of Tornado, the first mainline railway locomotive to be built in Britain for many years. Tornado just happens to be a steam engine, a slightly modernised recreation of a London and North Eastern Railway express passenger "Pacific" of 60 years ago.

Created over 18 years and at a cost of £3m by the A1 Locomotive Trust in Darlington, Tornado has captured the hearts of railway enthusiasts worldwide. Network Rail was astonished by the sheer scale and enthusiasm of the camera-toting crowds who turned up - all ages, classes, colours, genders and creeds - to witness the muscular apple green locomotive's first arrival at King's Cross. News of Tornado's exploits has been reported around the world, including China, where most heavy industry seems to be rooted today.

When Prince Charles officially named Tornado, it was against the backdrop of the sweeping curve of York's 1870s train shed, an adventure in cast-iron Victorian gothic designed by Thomas Prosser and William Peachey, and a properly Olympian setting for an Olympian locomotive. Within sight of those on the platform was York Minster, a commanding example of English craft, architecture and resolve. Overhead, a flight of RAF Tornado jets roared past. For a few precious minutes, York harboured a stirring gathering of British design and engineering excellence, a legacy to savour.

Turn now to the scene enacted a fortnight ago at Stratford, east London, where the mayor of London, the secretary of state for communities and the Olympics minister unveiled "legacy plans" for the 2012 Olympics. Now that prized private funding has vanished, the legacy will be paid for by the public purse. It had better be good. As good as York Minster, York station, a fly past of the RAF's finest and Tornado, the green engine stealing hearts away.

There will be lots and lots of homes, zero-carbon, of course, based on German and Swedish, rather than English, precedent and connected by footpaths and cycleways around a determinedly uninspired park. There will be a National Skills Academy for sports and leisure industries, rock concerts, an "Olympic university" and other things. What things? Well, you know, small, environmentally friendly things. Anyway, it will all be "world class", or about as enticing as a bowl of cold porridge.

I wonder if it has occurred to these London Olympians, so different in stature and ambition from York's, that the seeds of a truly worthwhile legacy are in the very soil of Stratford and along the banks of the river Lea that flows lugubriously through it. The site chosen for the 2012 Austerity Olympics was, until 1991, home to the Stratford railway works, founded in 1847. It held the record for high-speed manufacturing; in 1891, one of James Holden's 0-6-0 freight locomotives was built here in nine hours and 47 minutes. It went straight into service and ran more than 1.2 million miles over the following 44 years.

Stratford and the Lea Valley were, in fact, the cradle of a second industrial revolution, with Britain at its forefront. Up the river Lea, companies like Avro and Hawker Siddeley got Britain into the air. Here, in 1904, Ambrose Fleming invented the diode valve, a key to the development of radio, television, computers and the internet. The first radio valves were made here, and the first television tubes emerged 20 years later. Aero-engines and custom-designed London buses were made in Walthamstow. Lee-Enfield rifles were made here, too.

If we were serious about creating a legacy from the Olympics, we would do everything we could to establish the latest forms of manufacturing here. We might, of course, even choose to build the next generation of high-speed trains here. Such industry would mean young people learning valuable and enjoyable skills, a future workforce with responsible and uplifting jobs, and a solid economic base on which to build a post-financial services dependent economy.

Sadly, British politicians tend to have little care for manufacturing, railways and British jobs. Yesterday the Prince of Wales evoked the spirit of a manufacturing and design legacy we could have - in ultra-modern form - but which we will reject as a matter of course in favour of unimaginative, posturing "urban regeneration", which will see the East End of London little better off than before - collectively stacking the shelves of Hadean supermarkets rather than building the modern equivalent of the Olympian Tornado.

• Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic jonathan.glancey@guardian.co.uk