Robinson in Space (1997) - full transcript
Robinson is commissioned to investigate the unspecified "problem of England." The narrator describes his seven excursions, with the unseen Robinson, around the country. They mainly concentrate on ports, power stations, prisons, and manufacturing plants, but they also bring in various literary connections, as well as a few conventional landscapes.
[Sombre instrumental music]
[Announcer at railway station
chattering over P.A. system]
NARRATOR: [Voiceover] Sitting comfortably,
I opened my copy...
of The Revolution of Everyday Life.
Reality, as it evolves, sweeps me with it.
I'm struck by everything, and though not
everything strikes me in the same way...
I'm always struck
by the same basic contradiction:
although I can always see how
beautiful anything could be
if only I could change it...
in practically every case,
there is nothing I can really do.
Everything is changed into something else
in my imagination.
Then the dead weight of things changes it
back into what it was in the first place.
A bridge between imagination and reality
must be built.
[Sombre instrumental music continues]
After Robinson published the results
of his study of London...
I didn't see him again for a long time...
but I heard that he'd been dismissed
from his university position.
And after a period in which he sank
into a deep depression...
had taken a part-time job teaching English
in a language school in Reading...
where he was now living.
He wrote to me in the spring of 1995...
suggesting that I should
come down to Reading on a visit.
I was struck by the improvement
in his mood...
and arranged to spend a few days with him.
Robinson met me at the station,
and took me immediately to Kings Road...
where he had identified the building which
had been the coaching establishment...
where Rimbaud was employed
as a teacher of French in 1874.
He was very excited by this and the other
literary associations of the town...
which he praised with the
euphoria reminiscent of
that of Nietzsche for Turin.
So much so,
that I was concerned for his well-being...
and the extent of his commitment
to the derangement of the senses.
The Maiwand Lion
commemorates the battle...
after which Dr. John Watson
was invalided out of the army...
and into his acquaintance
with Sherlock Holmes.
Jane Austen was educated
in two rooms above the abbey gateway...
which is next to the jail
where Oscar Wilde was imprisoned...
for the last years of his sentence.
"It is only shallow people
who do not judge by appearances.
"The true mystery of the world is
the visible, not the invisible."
I did not think that Robinson's move
to Reading was a good one.
Despite his vision that other people
could become fellows and neighbours...
the fact is, as Lefebvre says:
"The space which contains the realised
preconditions of another life...
"is the same one as prohibits
what those preconditions make possible.'
He had been living in a single room
in a house in the northern suburbs.
His job was poorly paid and insecure.
He did not eat well,
he seemed to know no one in the town...
and he had no telephone.
His only reassurance was the presence...
of 18 undeniably utopian
Routemaster buses...
operated by enthusiasts
in a deregulated market.
He could not keep up
the effort of his euphoria...
nor hide his vulnerability,
his fear of provincial England.
He had been taunted
by groups of homophobic youths...
when he ventured into town in the evening.
He had once told me
that he wished to become a spy...
but was not sure who to approach.
In the afternoon, he took me to
the Chatham Street car park...
overlooking the Ramada Hotel,
where it turned out he was now living.
He told me that some weeks before,
he had received a letter...
from a representative of a well-known
international advertising agency...
inviting him to a meeting at the hotel.
These people had heard
of his study of London...
and wished to commission him
to undertake a peripatetic study...
of the problem of England.
He had accepted this
offer with alacrity...
and insisted that I
join him as researcher.
Our first outing was to a record shop
in Friar Street...
where Adam Ant
was making a personal appearance.
The music industry
is one of the UK's most successful...
and brings in more money from abroad
than motor manufacturing...
its products often characterised
by sexual ambivalence...
and a traditional English contempt
for petty bourgeois England.
Robinson had once taught at the art school
where Adam Ant was a student.
The next day, we visited the house
at West Green...
built by General Henry 'Hangman' Hawley
who commanded the cavalry at Culloden...
the former home of
Allistair Lord McAlpine...
treasurer of the Conservative Party
between 1975 and 1990.
The recent gateposts and the obelisk
are by the architect Quinlan Terry.
The obelisk bears an inscription in Latin.
This monument was built
with a large sum of money...
which would have otherwise fallen,
sooner or later...
into the hands of the tax gatherers.
"It is my belief, Watson," said Holmes...
"founded upon my experience, that the
lowest and vilest alleys in London...
"do not present
a more dreadful record of sin...
"than does the smiling
and beautiful countryside."
The Winnersh Triangle
Business and Distribution Park...
is in the Wokingham constituency
of John Redwood...
admired by Gingrich Republicans
in the United States...
as the leader of the revolutionary wing
of Great Britain's Conservative Party.
On Easter Monday, Greenpeace
activists blocked the outfall...
from the Atomic Weapons Establishment
at Aldermaston.
Robinson had read that
the growth of high technology industry...
in the M4 corridor was triggered...
by the number of government research
establishments in the Reading area.
On the centenary of the Martian landing
on Horsell Common near Woking...
which was so vividly described
by H.G. Wells...
Robinson took me to see the crater.
He told me that there were more than
100 patents in microelectronics...
nanotechnology and other fields
for uses of Buckminsterfullerenes...
the large, spherical carbon molecules...
discovered in cosmic dust
by British and other scientists...
but they are all held abroad.
[Solemn instrumental music]
The Martians destroyed most of Surrey.
500 tons of Mars is estimated
to land on Earth each year.
[Birds chirping]
On St George's Day...
a group of campaigners occupied land
at Wesley, near St George's Hill...
the private estate developed in 1911
on former common land...
where the diggers had set up camp in 1649.
"We are challenging
the government's whole philosophy...
"about the pre-eminence of property
rights," said their spokesman...
an Oxford University Fellow.
Robinson had not found
any Buckminsterfullerenes...
in the crater at Horsell Common,
but he was impressed...
by the technology of the
latter-day levellers.
On the 28th, the eve
of World No Golf Day...
they occupied the golf course
at St George's Hill.
May the 4th was the day
of the local elections.
Despite the poor air quality,
we set out for a walk...
in the Bluebell Woods towards Henley...
and came across
a group of satellite dishes...
at a location
we've been asked not to name...
which are the television receivers
for the BBC's World Monitoring Service...
a few miles away at Caversham Park,
established during World War ll.
With the coincidence of the Tory election
defeat and the V-E Day anniversary...
there was a lot of talk
about the 1945 election...
and how laissez-faire
had been kept off the political agenda...
until those who participated
in the war at decision-making level...
had departed from the scone.
Robinson says that unless
Labour wins a landslide victory
in the general election...
there is always a Conservative majority
in England.
Henley is the constituency
of Michael Heseltine...
then the president of the Board of Trade.
It was twinned with
Baroma, Somalia in 1981.
As we walked back to Reading...
we passed the preparations
for a celebration bonfire.
Robinson told me that he'd received
instructions from our employer...
and that the next day, we would begin
the first of seven journeys...
that were to be the basis of our project.
This method had been suggested
by his reading...
Daniel Defoe's Tour Through
the Whole Island of Great Britain...
which is based on Defoe's travels
as a spy for Robert Harley...
the government minister
in the reign of Queen Anne.
The narrative of Britain
since Defoe's time...
is the result of a particularly English
kind of capitalism.
With our contracts
and expense account agreed...
we set out to follow the Thames
downstream to the sea.
Passing Fawley Court,
a work of Sir Christopher Wren...
and the nearby tunnels
that allow toads to cross the road...
we came to the Henley Management College
and Research Centre at Greenlands...
which offers degree and NVQ courses
for individuals and corporate groups.
The village of Medmenham
is near the abbey ruins...
where the Hellfire Club
held their nocturnal revels.
The Shelleys moved to Albion House
in Marlow In 1817...
where she transcribed
his Revolt of Islam...
and prepared Frankenstein for publication.
Marlow is also home
to the UK headquarters...
of Volvo, Saab and Rank Xerox.
And at Cookham,
near the home of Stanley Spencer...
is the headquarters
of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
The Fountain of Love at Cliveden
was bought in Rome by William Waldorf...
the first Lord Astor, In 1897.
It was at Cliveden that John Profumo
first met Christine Keeler...
who was staying at a
cottage in the grounds.
She was naked beside the swimming pool.
The Astor's pro-appeasement stance...
and their entertainment of von Ribbentrop
and Oswald Mosley...
led to belief in the existence
of the Cliveden Set...
a conspiracy giving tacit support
to Hitler's conquest of Europe.
Cliveden's prominence has always rested...
on its proximity to London and its views.
The present house
is the work of Sir Charles Barry...
the architect of the
Palace of Westminster.
And the view along the river
was compared by Garibaldi...
with the mighty river prospects
of South America.
At Maidenhead, we passed beneath
Brunel's Bridge of 1837...
the longest-spanning brickbuilt arches
in Europe...
and the scene of Turner's
Rain, Steam, and Speed.
In a letter from Ethiopia...
Rimbaud imagined a son
who would become a famous engineer...
a man rich and powerful through science.
With the departure of Douglas Hurd
for the NatWest...
there remained three Old Etonians
in a Cabinet of 23.
About an eighth.
Between 1868 and 1955...
of the 294 Cabinet ministers
who held office...
over a quarter attended Eton...
so, either Eton is no longer what it was,
or more likely...
government is no longer an occupation
that is so necessary...
for Etonians to be concerned with.
We left the river bank at Windsor...
where the 180 mile riverside
park is blocked because it
passes through the Royal Estate.
The riverbank was enclosed
by Queen Victoria...
with an Act of Parliament in 1860...
despite the prohibition
of the Magna Carta...
which is displayed
at the memorial at Runnymede...
erected by the American Bar Association
in 1930.
Nearing Heathrow,
we came across a factory...
the first we'd seen since leaving Reading.
All the more unusual,
since most toys are made in China.
Bendy products are made in natural rubber.
Heathrow Airport, where the first
commercial flight took off in 1946...
is the busiest international airport
in the world.
Robinson didn't like to continue
into London...
fearing reprisals for his earlier study.
So, after a journey on the Underground and
many hours wandering lost in tunnels...
we emerged from the workings
of the Jubilee Line Extension...
near the site subsequently chosen
for the Millennium Exhibition...
and didn't stop until we reached Becton.
East Ham Churchyard,
opposite the Becton ski slope...
is the largest churchyard in England.
Robinson was hoping to find
some trace of the opium den...
frequented by Dorian Gray by following
the route described in the story...
but he couldn't find anyone to ask.
Coming soon on this site...
a Warner Brothers nine screen
multiplex cinema...
opening Easter, 1996.
We had read that Ford
was seeking government aid...
to build a new small car for Mazda...
but that their Dagenham plant was facing
competition from Valencia in Spain.
The development of Rainham Marshes
was, for the time being, unlikely...
as the Channel Tunnel
Rail Link Terminal...
had been confirmed at Ebbsfleet
on the south side of the estuary.
Robinson thought he'd discovered
Dracula's house, Carfax at Purfleet...
until I pointed out
that we were still in Rainham.
When we reached Purfleet...
he was surprised to find the view of
London unchanged since he had left...
despite both his predictions
of imminent ruin...
and various attempts
to link the Channel Tunnel...
with the regeneration of the
estuary, balancing the pull
of Heathrow in the west.
Robinson had purchased
a copy of Port Statistics...
a publication
of the Government Statistical Service...
and every night,
he pored over it with a calculator...
emerging from time to time
with some new revelation.
Port traffic continues to increase...
exports have increased
fivefold since 1965...
most rapidly in the late '70s,
when North Sea oil was first exploited.
Imports have fluctuated, but overall,
have risen by more than a fifth.
The Thames estuary
from Teddington to Foulness...
is still the leading port in the UK...
though, in foreign traffic...
the Humber ports outrank the total
for London and the Medway.
The docks at Tilbury, sold to its
employees in 1992 for £32 million...
was bought recently by Forth Ports PLC
for £132 million.
There is a house nearby where Daniel Defoe
wrote part of Robinson Crusoe.
Having spent the night at Tilbury
in the manner of the pilgrims...
we spent the morning at the Lakeside
Shopping Centre at Thurrock...
before crossing the river to Dartford.
Robinson was anxious to see the town
which is the birthplace...
of both Keith Richards and Mick Jagger
of The Rolling Stones.
It was Environment Week in Dartford.
We visited the landfill at Ebbsfleet...
where Blue Circle
proposed to build a new town...
alongside the Channel Tunnel Station...
and Donald Trump
is rumoured to be planning casinos.
Marlowe, the narrator
of Conrad's Heart of Darkness...
tells his story on a
ship lying off Gravesend.
On the following evening,
we reached the Isle of Sheppey.
The fully-automated plant at Windham...
produces 120 square metres
of plasterboard per minute...
the fastest-running production line
in Europe.
Coast Steel Sheerness
recycles scrap into steel rod and bar.
The Canadian company
evangelises total team culture...
in which overtime is unpaid
and union members fear identification.
The Port of Sheerness...
where 300 dockers
lost massive share profits...
through being made redundant
when they refused a pay cut...
is now owned by the
Mersey Dock and Harbour Company.
This was the end of our first journey.
The next day, we returned to Reading.
Two weeks later, we set off again
by the packhorse road...
over the hills towards Oxford.
The Oratory is an independent,
selective secondary school for boys.
We were pleased to have an opportunity...
to study the authorship of appearances
in the English countryside.
As we began our descent, we could
see the power station at Didcot...
which generates about 5%
of peak demand in England.
Near the river,
we came across a break in the hedge...
where an excavation crossed the road.
From Wittenham clumps,
we could see that it led to Didcot...
a gas pipeline to supply
a new power nation...
being built next to the existing one,
which runs on coal.
Didcot is operated by National Power.
[Birds chirping]
[Machinery humming in the distance]
The Wittenham Clumps were the magic
landscape of the painter Paul Nsah...
but we had to press on,
following the Thames upstream...
deeper into the interior of the country.
[Upbeat instrumental music]
On the evening of the 12th of June,
we arrived in Oxford...
the King's headquarters
in the Civil War...
and Hitler's preferred capital
had he occupied England.
Most of what was once
the Morris Motor Works at Cowley...
was demolished in 1993...
and the site is now a business perk
owned by British Aerospace...
who sold the Rover Group to BMW in 1994.
There's been little made of the fact...
that Bernd Pischetsrieder,
the chairman of BMW...
is the great-nephew
of the late Alec Issigonis...
whose innovative designs for Morris
and its successors...
could probably have given the company
a 10-year lead over Volkswagen...
in the European mass market.
At Magdalene,
pronounced "maudlin," College...
we visited the rooms once occupied
by Oscar Wilde...
who apparently enjoyed Oxford...
though its atmosphere
of stifled sexuality...
must have been even more striking than
than it is today.
The Fellows were not allowed to marry
until 1877...
and despite, or perhaps
because of the small numbers of women...
open homoeroticism is still most unusual.
The President showed us the new buildings
by Demetri Porphyrios...
which he described as examples
of the architecture of the future.
Our employer has suggested
we should buy a car.
While I was impressed by the favourable
reports of the current local product...
Robinson preferred the older 1100
we'd seen earlier.
I was sent to make the purchase,
and he went off to the Bodleian.
We visited Christ Church,
where as librarian...
Robert Burton lived a silent, sedentary,
solitary, private life.
The Anatomy of Melancholy
appeared In 1621...
under the pseudonym Democritus, Junior.
"The Jacobean melancholy, like our own,"
said Robinson...
"was the result of a disorientation.
"You and I are deeply
disillusioned people."
Burton was vicar of St
Thomas the Martyr...
between 1616 and his death in 1639.
The porch is his addition.
I think we were never so happy
as on the day of our pilgrimage...
to the memorials of Robert Burton.
The car was fitted with a radio.
It turned out
that it had belonged to a member...
of a successful Oxford pop group.
[Aeroplane engine humming]
Opposite the airport
is Campsfield House...
the privately-run detention centre
where up to 200 asylum seekers...
are held in prison-like conditions.
In April, the inexperience
of its management and staff...
had been severely criticised
by the Chief Inspector of Prisons.
Campsfield House is run
by Group 4 Security.
[Rock music]
"Whatever is fitted in any sort...
"to excite the idea of pain and danger...
"that is to say, whatever is
in any sort terrible," says Burke...
"is a source of the sublime."
[Rock music continues]
We had arranged to visit
the new Aston Martin works at Bloxham.
The literary stereotype
of the sadistic Englishmen...
endures in the drug excesses
of contemporary aristocrats...
and as James Bond.
Robinson had never paid much attention
to James Bond...
but he wondered
if we shouldn't have bought a faster car.
We passed the United States Air Force's
603 Communications Squadron...
at RAF Croughton...
and the Defence Clothing
and Textile Agency at Bicester.
In the afternoon, we came to Stowe...
described by the National Trust
as "Britain's largest work of art."
The house has been a public school
since 1923.
In the landscaped gardens...
based on Milton's description
in Paradise Lost...
is Kent's Temple of British Worthies...
where we paid our respects
to Milton for Pandemonium...
Shakespeare for Yorick...
and Locke
for Duration and its Simple Modes...
and the Succession of Ideas.
"For whilst we receive successively
ideas in our minds...
"we know that we do exist...
"and so we animate the existence...
"or the continuation of the existence
of ourselves."
At Bletchley Park,
Alan Turing built the machine...
that cracked the Enigma naval codes
In 1942.
On June the 10th,
we arrived in Milton Keynes...
visiting the multi-denominational
cathedral in Silbury Boulevard...
opposite the shopping centre.
We stayed in Milton Keynes for a
fortnight, leaving on July the second.
We couldn't find the site where the
Wiccans worship, which we'd read about...
but there is a holy wall at Stevington
which was easy to find.
That night, we slept in a shed.
It was never easy
to find a decent place to stay...
but we generally took whet was offered,
imagining that...
the problem of hotels in England
would be of interest to our employer.
We woke up outside what we thought
must be the biggest...
and is, apparently,
the busiest landfill in the country:
one of several sites
which had previously been exploited...
by the London Brick Company.
The next day's pilgrimages
were to the airship hangers...
at Carlington, and to Bedford.
[Bell tolling in the distance]
At a garage near St Neots...
as we were thinking of
trading in the 1100...
for an old Volvo
full of second-hand books...
we heard on the radio that John Major
had been re-elected...
leader of the Tory Party.
That evening, we reached Cambridge...
which we had thought
might be more congenial than Oxford.
Our employer had been unable to secure us
an invitation to dine at Peterhouse...
the oldest, the nastiest college...
so we couldn't confirm its reputation
for orgiastic revelry...
or gauge any lingering influence
of Maurice Cowling...
the unusually right-wing historian
who was Michael Portillo's tutor.
[Bell tolling]
In the morning,
we had a look at Jesus College...
where Laurence Sterne
was an undergraduate...
and where the patrons of architecture
of the future...
were, in our opinion, at least
better advised than those in Oxford.
After lunch
and several games of table football...
we drove off towards Felixstowe.
The Devil's Dyke marks the boundary
of Cambridge here in Suffolk...
soon after which we joined
the newly renamed A14 trunk road...
European Route E28,
which has cut journey time to the port.
St Edmundsbury is the town
of all this part of England...
in proportion to its bigness,
most thronged with gentry.
People of the best fashion
and the most polite conversation...
of which other writers
have talked very largely...
and perhaps a little too much.
Ipswich is still a considerable port,
probably more so than in Defoe's time...
with large tonnages
of cereals and animal feed.
But our destination
was the Port of Felixstowe...
which is owned by Hutchinson Whampoa,
tho Hong Kong group...
who, with British Aerospace
own the Orange Mobile Telephone network.
Felixstowe handles half of all
UK deep sea container traffic...
in which imports slightly
outweigh exports.
It is the fourth largest container port
in Europe, 15th in the world.
[Machine beeping]
We were booked on the 11:00 ferry
to Zeebrugge...
Robinson said that he had to meet
our employer at a conference in Lille.
I spent a few days resting...
then set off to walk along the
coast of Calais where we had
arranged to meet at the ferry.
I visited some friends I hadn't seen
for several years...
and spent a weekend with Bray-Dunes,
where I lived In the early 1970s.
Freight through Dover has increased
tenfold since 1965.
Despite the tunnel, over half the UK's
international goods vehicle traffic...
still runs through the port.
One million vehicles per year.
Nationally, roll-on roll-off traffic
is about equal to that in containers...
but the rate of increase
has been much greater.
It's always difficult
coming back to England.
But we were expected in Brighton,
and soon forgot our bad thoughts.
The Victory, Nelson's flagship
is preserved at Portsmouth...
and is the principal monument
of the 18th century British Navy...
the largest industrial unlit of its day
in the western world...
on whose supremacy was built
the capitalism of land...
finance and commercial services
centred on the city of London...
which dominates the economy
of the south of England.
Those of us aesthetes
who view the passing of the visible
industrial economy with regret...
and who longed for
an authenticity of appearance...
based on manufacturing
and innovative modern design...
are inclined to view
this English culture...
as a bizarre and damaging anachronism.
But if so, it is not an unsuccessful one.
Our visit to Portsmouth coincided with
that of a group of Sandhurst cadets.
In the afternoon, we visited Southampton,
home port of the Titanic...
where the Spitfire was developed...
and the new dark fibre optic
were invented at the University.
"A sea port ls a pleasant
place for a soul...
"worn out with life's struggles,"
says Baudelaire.
"The wide expanse of the sky,
the mobile clouds...
"the ever-changing colours of the sea..."
A ship like the P&O's Colombo Bay
has a crew of 20...
and carries up to 4,200 containers...
each one of which may be
the full load of an articulated lorry.
The M3 at Twyford Down had opened
in the previous October.
At Newbury, the bypass
had been confirmed...
a few days after
the Tory leadership election...
and people were already
living in the trees.
Towards Dorchester,
we passed Charborough Park.
Col Henry Drax left Yorkshire after
the Civil War and settled in Barbados...
where, in a few years,
from £300 in sugar plantations...
he acquired an estate
of £8,000 to £9,000 a year.
His successor married the heiress
of the Earls of Charborough.
Following the Enclosure Acts...
agricultural wages in Dorset had dropped
to nine shillings a week.
George Loveless and others tried
to get the wages increased...
but they were lowered to six shillings.
"We have injured no man's reputation,
character, person or property.
'"We were uniting together to protect
ourselves, our wives and our children...
"from utter degradation and starvation."
In England, 1.1% of employees
work in agriculture.
A coffee shop assistant at Tesco
eans £3.53 an hour.
We very often ate in supermarkets.
For the provincial spy
or anyone in a hurry...
who needs petrol, parking,
telephone, postal services...
clean toilets and palatable food,
there's really no practical alternative.
On the other side of Dorchester
is Poundbury...
the project of the Prince of Wales...
which with the magazine Perspectives
and the Institute of Architecture...
is the outcome of his 10-year opposition
to contemporary architecture.
The project was planned,
apparently with some difficulties...
by the architect Leon Krier...
and has been executed by the Percy Thomas
Partnership of Cardiff.
Our arrival in Yeovil
coincided with that of Tim Eggar...
the Trade and Industry minister,
who was to announce that...
Westland had been awarded
a £25 billion order...
to build American attack helicopters
for the Army...
in preference to the domestic options
offered by British Aerospace and GEC.
Westland is new owned by GKN.
For the rest of the day, we looked
at some non-agricultural land uses.
We knew of six Jane Austen
film or television adaptations underway...
all involving country houses,
mostly in the west of England.
Sense and Sensibility was made
at Montacute.
We called at Worthy Farm near
Glastonbury where the festival
site was being cleared...
and Halecombe Quarry at Leigh-on-Mendip.
The DOE believes that
the demand for aggregates...
could more than double
in the next 20 years.
On the 14th July,
we reached the Bristol Channel.
We were expected at the Portbury Dock.
Bristol imports more cars
than any other port in the UK...
and had the best PR of
any port we visited.
Bristol is closer to the enormous markets
of the Americas, Australia...
and the Pacific rim
than any other port in the UK.
The port of Bristol is the only major
UK port to employ a permanent workforce.
There were 60,000 cars at Portbury...
ready for the new registration year
on August 1st...
including many Daewoos from South Korea,
new on the UK market.
Two weeks later, we came back
again to visit the automated
plasterboard factory...
on the coal stockyard to which material:
are conveyed directly from the ships.
The coal is mostly
from Richard's Bay in South Africa...
and is carried to power stations by train.
In Bristol, we visited
the LLandoger Trow...
where Defoe is supposed to
have met Alexander Selkirk,
the real Robinson Crusoe.
LLandoger Trow was a boat that carried
coal to Bristol from South Wales
In Richard Jeffries' After London...
the red rocks of Bristol
are the western extremity...
of the lake that has covered
most of southern England...
and the Severn is silted up.
Robinson had been
most affected by the book...
which we'd heard one night
being read on the radio...
and had mistaken for a documentary.
Although it was then the hottest day of
the year, we walked out onto the bridge.
In the afternoon, we visited Filton.
Our employer had given Robinson a copy...
of Capitalism, Culture and
Decline In Britain, 1750-1990...
by W.D. Rubinstein...
who notes the close and harmonious
connection before 1832...
between city finance, land,
the professions and the government...
as contractor, loan agent and originator
of old corruption...
the extraordinary system
of lucrative perquisites...
which came to fortunate aristocrats,
government employees and their relatives.
The British government itself acted
as the central matrix of this system...
directly through contracts and perquisite,
indirectly by maintaining...
British control of the seas,
the Empire and the balance of power.
"Britain's role as the world's
fifth largest trading nation...
"is essential for its economic
well-being," said Lord
Mackey, the Lord Chancellor...
during the first reading
of the Intelligence Services Bill in 1993.
It was very hot.
The Defence Evaluation
and Research Agency at Malvern...
is a world centre for liquid crystal
and semiconductor research.
"They talk much of mines
of gold and silver," said Defoe...
"which are certainly to be found here,
if they were but looked for...
"and that Malvern would outdo Potosi."
It was the driest summer
since records began.
We wanted to have a look
at Blakenhurst Prison near Redditch...
run by UK Detention Services...
one of six Bullingdon type prisons
based on an original design...
by Building Design Partnership.
Merry Hill near Dudley
is the largest shopping centre in Europe.
More than four and a half million people
are within 65 minutes drlve.
It is connected to the nearby
waterfront development by a monorail...
though this was not operating
on the day of our visit.
At the top of the hill are the offices
of the Child Support Agency.
The waterfront and Merry Hill
were built on the site...
of the former Round Oak Steel Works.
Merry Hill attracts 25 million
shopping visits a year...
and its effects are felt
in towns 200 miles away.
Robinson wanted to visit Halesowen...
to see the factory where
the supergun parts have been produced.
We were both ill
from the cumulative effects...
of months of bad food
and living in hotels...
and were becoming seriously worried
about the weather.
Robinson imagined
the entire landscape occupied...
in manufacturing goods for export
to the Middle East.
The West Midlands are traditionally
the region where elections are decided.
In the Dudley West by-election
the previous December...
Labour's winning share of the vote had
been their biggest in any by-election...
in a Tory seat since 1933.
On August 11th,
we reached West Bromwich...
where we had come to see
the headquarters of Hyundai, UK...
which is part-owned by a company
called International Motors.
Their Phoenix International
Industrial Estate...
is next to the factory
of Phoenix Drawn Tube.
In an essay by the geographer
Doreen Massey, we had read:
"Amid the Ridley Scott visions
of world cities...
"the writing about skyscraper fortresses,
Baudrillard visions of hyperspace...
"most people still live in places
like Halston or West Bromwich."
Across the road is a chemical
manufacturing company
called Robinson Brothers.
Robinson introduced himself
to the managing director
and explained our project.
We were very generously looked after for
the next two weeks while we convalesced.
"Much of life, for many people,"
read Robinson...
"even in the heart of the first world...
"consists of waiting in a bus shelter
with your shopping...
"for a bus that never comes."
The bus shelter was opposite the promises
of Smallmen Lubricants.
When the bus finally arrived,
Robinson had disappeared...
to a sexual encounter with a stranger
he contacted through the internet...
while we were waiting at the bus stop.
Our employer had equipped us with
a notebook computer and a mobile phone.
We walked over to the Hiatt Works
in Great Barr.
Hiatt is one of the oldest firms
in Birmingham.
Established In 1780
in the era of the slave trade...
who make handcuffs and other items...
and whose name recently still appeared
on leg irons used in Saudi prisons.
Robinson went in
and bought a pair of handcuffs.
Beneath Spaghetti Junction,
we met a man with a dog...
who said he'd been paid
for denouncing illegal immigrants...
who'd been working on repairs
to the structure.
We were very relieved to reach the
Jaguar body plant at Castle Bromwich...
where Ford had secured government
investment for X-200 small saloon.
This is the factory where thousands of
Spitfires were built during World War ll.
The next day, we left Birmingham.
Neither of us knows
anything about Johnson...
except that The Anatomy of
Melancholy was the only book
that ever took him out of bed...
two hours earlier than he wanted to rise.
We crossed the River Trent
to Burton where we stayed the
night and woke up very early.
[Fast-paced instrumental music]
The day we arrived in Derby...
Rolls Royce announced half year profits up
43% to £70 million...
though the chairman would not rule out
more job losses...
and the shares fell 8%.
"The English are acknowledged
world leaders in fetishism and S&M"'...
Robinson road in the paper.
The only company in the world that makes
latex sheeting suitable for fetish wear...
is based in Derbyshire.
We wanted to visit Robin Hood's Well,
near Eastwood...
but the Wood had been fenced off
by the owner.
We did not go any further
in this direction.
We turned towards the northwest...
and the next morning set off towards
Liverpool, following the Derwent Valley.
[Fast-paced instrumental music resumes]
[Birds calling]
Tesco is still expanding
in the north of England.
The distribution centre at Middlewich
holds 43 million cases...
about 9 days' stock for 120 stores...
and delivers as far away as Gateshead.
Six more superstores are scheduled to open
in the north by May 1997.
[Fast-paced instrumental music resumes]
On September 4th, we arrived in Liverpool.
In the statistics for 1993...
the Mersey Dock and Harbour Company
wee the most profitable...
of any port authority listed.
In the last 30 years,
Liverpool's traffic has fluctuated...
more than that of any other UK port.
It is now about the same as in 1965...
three times more than in the early '80s...
and Liverpool is one of
the biggest ports in England.
Liverpool imports coal for Powergen
from the USA and Columbia...
and exports enormous tonnages of scrap...
mostly to the Far East and Spain.
The company did not want us
to photograph the scrap.
Not long after our visit,
they sacked 329 dock workers...
for refusing to cross a picket line.
When dockers in New York
began secondary protests...
the ACL container line...
said it would leave Liverpool
unless the lock-out there was ended.
And the Mersey Company's share value
dropped by £70 million.
The biggest shareholder
in the Mersey Dock and Harbour Company...
is the Treasury.
Our next appointments were in Warrington.
The Thorn Cross
Young Offender institution...
which had been chosen to become
the first US-style boot camp...
and the KinderCare Nursery,
the first to open in the UK.
KinderCare runs over a thousand centres
in 38 American states.
Warrington is near the crossing point
of two motorways...
and has attracted many
large distribution centres.
We stayed the night in a
Whitbread Travel Inn near Wigan...
that had opened the previous week.
Our rooms were quite new.
No one had ever stayed in them before.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway
opened on September 18th, 1830.
Robinson took me to see the memorial
to William Huskisson...
the Cabinet Minister
who was knocked down by the rocket...
as it passed the dignitaries
gathered for the occasion.
British Coal closed
Parkside Colliery in 1993...
and cleared the site after
an 18-month-long women's protest vigil.
They proposed a massive distribution
centre for Morrison's Supermarket...
with 5,000 vehicle movements daily.
The coal used to go by train
to Fiddler's' Ferry Power Station...
which is now supplied from the terminal
we'd seen in Liverpool Docks.
We had lunch in a brand new
Marks and Spencer...
on the edge of Warrington.
Robinson told me he had a relative...
who emigrated to Canada
from Warrington in 1935.
He walked to the locks at Latchford and
boarded one of the Manchester liners...
that sailed to the Great Lakes
until the late '70s.
We arrived in Manchester
on September 19th.
In 1937...
Turing published his paper
on computable numbers.
Two years later, he joined the Code
and Cipher School at Bletchley Park...
in the team that cracked
the German Navy's Enigma Code...
so that convoys could dodge
U-boats in the North Atlantic.
He continued his computer work
at Manchester University...
becoming Director of
the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine.
In 1954...
a police investigation
of a burglary at his home...
led to his being charged
with gross indecency.
He pleaded guilty
and was put on probation...
on condition that he submitted
to hormone treatment.
Shortly afterwards, he killed himself...
by eating en apple
impregnated with cyanide.
He was 42.
[Solemn instrumental music]
Murray's Mill in Ancoats
was built in 1798.
It is the world's oldest
steam-driven mill...
and as such,
is described as the first factory.
Engels visited Ancoats
frequently in 1842...
when working for the firm of
Erman and Engels in Manchester.
His Condition of the Working Class
in England...
was published in 1845 in Leipzig...
but not in Britain until 1892.
We stayed in another Travel Inn
at Milnrow, near Rochdale...
which had been open for about a month.
These places always seem to be hosting
conferences for their own executives.
John Milne was a civil engineer
with a passion for volcanoes.
He travelled overland to Tokyo...
where he was Professor
of Geology and Mining...
and developed the seismograph.
He wrote many books,
including some science fiction.
We had ascended the Pennines
at Blackstone Edge...
by the route of Daniel Defoe.
When we arrived at Yorkshire Waters
Reservoir near Ripponden...
there were 24 tankers waiting to
load water to be taken into Halifax.
At the time,
there were altogether 40 lorries...
working from this
reservoir, 24 hours a day.
Later in the year, there were
as many as 1,000 tankers...
moving water in West Yorkshire.
Near the treatment works in Halifax...
someone told us
where they'd just seen another leak.
So we went and had a look.
We had an appointment at the wind farm...
on Oxenhope Moor, above the town.
We're both very fond of Halifax.
It was the first place
we'd had a decent cup of coffee in months.
At Saltaire, north of Bradford...
Pace Microtechnology make
digital television equipment for export...
to the Far East and Australasia.
The V&A never managed to
move their South Indian collection...
to the Lister Mill in Bradford,
but the police station is new.
In Leeds, the site of
the famous Quarry Hill flats...
is now occupied by
the Dept of Social Security.
Junction 27 is a leisure park...
Wakefield 41 is a distribution estate
where Morrison have their depots.
"On the threshold of our century,"
Henri Bergson wrote...
"If realty could immediately reach
our senses and our consciousness...
"if we could come into direct contact
with things and with each other...
"probably art would be useless,
or rather, we should all be artists."
While we were in Wakefield,
Robinson met someone who told him that...
Bergson's mother came from Doncaster.
There are three prisons in Doncaster.
The largest is run by a subsidiary of the
American Wackhut Corporation.
It has the cheapest cost per prisoner
in the UK...
a non-union staff,
and a record of violence and chaos.
Doncaster prison was designed
by Seifert Limited.
Bentley used to be one of the
most left-wing pits in Yorkshire.
When it closed, it was producing
the UK's cheapest coal...
undercutting oven Columbian imports.
There were 600,000 tonnes
stock piled at the pit.
RJB owned 17 of the 31 surviving pits
and have contracts...
with the power generators until 1998.
There are 1,000 miners
still working in the industry...
1% of the number in 1946.
The advancement of Stella Remington,
MI5's former director...
followed her role
directing sabotage of the miners' strike.
And the amateur interventions
of David Hart...
Old Etonian and former bankrupt...
began with his funding
strike-breaking miners.
He is new unpaid advisor to Michael
Portillo at the Ministry of Defence.
A third of all UK deep-mined coal
is burnt at Drax.
Hugo Drax was James Bond's opponent
in Monnraker.
On October 5th,
we entered the network area...
of Kingston Communications
on the north bank of the Humber.
Kingston Communications
ls owned through the City Council...
by the citizens of Hull.
Robinson took me to the fish dock.
He had read how the Navy used to recruit
trawler men as unpaid spies.
Daniel Defoe was happy
to welcome William III to England.
This statue was erected
in the year 1734...
to the memory of King William III,
our great deliverer.
Robinson and I are proud to recollect
our own experiences...
of the glorious revolution.
Robinson Crusoe sailed from Hull
on September 1st, 1651.
Kingston Communications
has invented in a satellite...
and has a worker-director on its board.
William Wilberforce was
born in Hull In 1759.
Hull is the eastern English port
on the Dublin to Berlin motorway.
In the last century,
the traffic was the other way...
as more than a million emigrants
from Central and Eastern Europe...
passed through the port on their way
to Liverpool in the new world.
Many settled in Yorkshire,
including perhaps the Levisons...
whose daughter Catherine
wee Henri Bergson's mother.
We crossed the estuary to Immingham.
To materialists like us, lmmingham is
the second largest port in the UK.
And yet, there are few ships
and we saw no seafarers.
Ships come in and out on a single tide,
no one has time to get off.
Volvo, Saab and BMW import cars...
but most of the traffic is in
bulk fuel and iron ore...
which involves very little labour.
Three million tonnes of coal a year
are imported through Immingham.
Hull's biggest private sector employer
is British Aerospace at Brough...
where it builds Hawks
for export to Indonesia.
We visited Scarborough to confirm the
details of Rimbaud's promontory palace.
Rimbaud was in Java in 1876.
In the afternoon, we sat on a bench
outside St Mary's Church, Whitby.
It is about 100 years since the Demeter
arrived in Whitby Harbour...
It's 50 great wooden boxes of earth
were consigned to Mr. Samuel Billington...
a Whitby solicitor, who had them sent
on to Purfleet by train.
Capt. James Cook began his career
as ship's boy on the Freelove.
On the evening of the 11th of October,
we arrived in Redcar.
British Steel's plant at Redcar is one of
the four major steel works in the country.
It produces 70,000
tonnes of steel a week...
70% of which is exported,
much of it to the Far East...
and employs hardly any people.
The steel industry's
current export surplus...
is about three quarters
of a billion pounds.
Wilton is one the biggest
chemical production sites in Europe.
It produces about 40
intermediate products.
The chemical industry's export surplus
is about £4 billion.
The service sector's share of exports
has declined since 1960
as a result of the mere extinction
of the merchant shipping fleet.
The Tees is the UK's biggest single port.
It imports iron ore and coal...
and exports oil and petroleum products.
Unemployment in Middlesbrough is 17%,
the highest in the country...
which has the least regulated labour
market in the industrialised world...
and the highest prison population
of any country in Europe.
We stopped to watch the Queen arrive
at the Samsung site at Wynyard Perk.
With £58 million of government aid...
Samsung have invested
£450 million in a plant...
which employs between
500 and 600 people...
producing microwave ovens
and computer monitors.
There was a small demonstration
by their committee...
to defend socialism in South Korea.
Wynyard Park is the
estate of Sir John Hall...
the developer of
the Gateshead Metro Centre.
He bought it in 1981 for £3 million
from the Marquis of Londonderry...
whose family were formerly coal owners...
and has developed golf courses,
housing estates and a hotel...
which was not the one we stayed in.
In the morning,
we travelled south to Shandy Hall.
Here dwelt Laurence Sterne,
many years incumbent of Coxwold.
Here he wrote Tristram Shandy
and A Sentimental Journey.
He died in London in 1768.
Near Harrogate, we passed...
the US National Security Agency's
installation at Menwith Hill.
This is the largest signals
intelligence base in the world...
and eavesdrops telephone
and other communications.
Some of the most sensitive of which
concern the exploitation...
of Buckminsterfullerenes.
Robinson is beginning to act strangely.
As we came down from the Pennines,
we passed Samlesbury...
and he tried to get past the security.
In Preston, he went to
another British Aerospace plant...
but it had been demolished.
He kept trying to tell
me about David Hart...
and his attempts to get the MID
to abandon the Tornado...
and lease second-hand F-16s...
about Gothic cathedrals...
and that Hollywood had overtaken
aerospace as the leading US export.
On the evening of 23rd of October...
he told me he was going out to steal
a piece of equipment...
from one of the Saudi Arabian Tornadoes.
Blackpool is Robinson's home town.
His parents used to have a nursery...
which specialised in
strains of giant vegetables.
He explained that life on earth
evolved after the arrival...
of Buckminsterfullerenes in meteorites.
He showed me where the Wellington Bomber
was built with the geodetic structure...
invented by Barnes Wallis.
We arrived in Blackpool
on the second day of Diwali...
and the last week of the illuminations.
Robinson says that Blackpool
holds the key to his Utopia.
He often repeated
Chamfort's favourite saying:
"In each man's life,
there comes the moment...
"when his heart must either burst
or turn to stone."
Blackpool stands between us
and revolution.
Radiation levels in the
Irish Sea are higher...
than in any sea, anywhere in the world.
We cross the lrish Sea to Barrow...
where the third Trident submarine
was nearing completion.
Robinson said he had to be in Newcastle
by the end of the week.
Then he said he needed a day off
to visit a relation.
He took me to the dump at Drigg
where radioactive waste...
is stored in deteriorating conditions...
and to the site
whore Nirex is proposing to build...
an underground repository for plutonium
and other high-level waste.
At Sellafield, the 1963 reactors'
heat exchangers...
were being removed as the first stage
of dismantling the reactor.
The Thorpe reprocessing plant
had finally started up...
In February 1995.
He said it was unlikely ever
to be even an economic proposition.
He told me that the plutonium aftermath
of the nuclear industry...
will remain lethal
for quarter of a million years.
At Wordsworth's birthplace...
I thought he was going to go in
and register a complaint.
On the 30th of October, without warning...
we were told
our contracts had been terminated...
and we heard on the car radio that
a Tornado had crashed in the North Sea.
I cannot tell you where Robinson
finally found his Utopia.
[Birds chirping]
[Solemn instrumental music]
[Music intensifies]
[Solemn instrumental music continues]
[Announcer at railway station
chattering over P.A. system]
NARRATOR: [Voiceover] Sitting comfortably,
I opened my copy...
of The Revolution of Everyday Life.
Reality, as it evolves, sweeps me with it.
I'm struck by everything, and though not
everything strikes me in the same way...
I'm always struck
by the same basic contradiction:
although I can always see how
beautiful anything could be
if only I could change it...
in practically every case,
there is nothing I can really do.
Everything is changed into something else
in my imagination.
Then the dead weight of things changes it
back into what it was in the first place.
A bridge between imagination and reality
must be built.
[Sombre instrumental music continues]
After Robinson published the results
of his study of London...
I didn't see him again for a long time...
but I heard that he'd been dismissed
from his university position.
And after a period in which he sank
into a deep depression...
had taken a part-time job teaching English
in a language school in Reading...
where he was now living.
He wrote to me in the spring of 1995...
suggesting that I should
come down to Reading on a visit.
I was struck by the improvement
in his mood...
and arranged to spend a few days with him.
Robinson met me at the station,
and took me immediately to Kings Road...
where he had identified the building which
had been the coaching establishment...
where Rimbaud was employed
as a teacher of French in 1874.
He was very excited by this and the other
literary associations of the town...
which he praised with the
euphoria reminiscent of
that of Nietzsche for Turin.
So much so,
that I was concerned for his well-being...
and the extent of his commitment
to the derangement of the senses.
The Maiwand Lion
commemorates the battle...
after which Dr. John Watson
was invalided out of the army...
and into his acquaintance
with Sherlock Holmes.
Jane Austen was educated
in two rooms above the abbey gateway...
which is next to the jail
where Oscar Wilde was imprisoned...
for the last years of his sentence.
"It is only shallow people
who do not judge by appearances.
"The true mystery of the world is
the visible, not the invisible."
I did not think that Robinson's move
to Reading was a good one.
Despite his vision that other people
could become fellows and neighbours...
the fact is, as Lefebvre says:
"The space which contains the realised
preconditions of another life...
"is the same one as prohibits
what those preconditions make possible.'
He had been living in a single room
in a house in the northern suburbs.
His job was poorly paid and insecure.
He did not eat well,
he seemed to know no one in the town...
and he had no telephone.
His only reassurance was the presence...
of 18 undeniably utopian
Routemaster buses...
operated by enthusiasts
in a deregulated market.
He could not keep up
the effort of his euphoria...
nor hide his vulnerability,
his fear of provincial England.
He had been taunted
by groups of homophobic youths...
when he ventured into town in the evening.
He had once told me
that he wished to become a spy...
but was not sure who to approach.
In the afternoon, he took me to
the Chatham Street car park...
overlooking the Ramada Hotel,
where it turned out he was now living.
He told me that some weeks before,
he had received a letter...
from a representative of a well-known
international advertising agency...
inviting him to a meeting at the hotel.
These people had heard
of his study of London...
and wished to commission him
to undertake a peripatetic study...
of the problem of England.
He had accepted this
offer with alacrity...
and insisted that I
join him as researcher.
Our first outing was to a record shop
in Friar Street...
where Adam Ant
was making a personal appearance.
The music industry
is one of the UK's most successful...
and brings in more money from abroad
than motor manufacturing...
its products often characterised
by sexual ambivalence...
and a traditional English contempt
for petty bourgeois England.
Robinson had once taught at the art school
where Adam Ant was a student.
The next day, we visited the house
at West Green...
built by General Henry 'Hangman' Hawley
who commanded the cavalry at Culloden...
the former home of
Allistair Lord McAlpine...
treasurer of the Conservative Party
between 1975 and 1990.
The recent gateposts and the obelisk
are by the architect Quinlan Terry.
The obelisk bears an inscription in Latin.
This monument was built
with a large sum of money...
which would have otherwise fallen,
sooner or later...
into the hands of the tax gatherers.
"It is my belief, Watson," said Holmes...
"founded upon my experience, that the
lowest and vilest alleys in London...
"do not present
a more dreadful record of sin...
"than does the smiling
and beautiful countryside."
The Winnersh Triangle
Business and Distribution Park...
is in the Wokingham constituency
of John Redwood...
admired by Gingrich Republicans
in the United States...
as the leader of the revolutionary wing
of Great Britain's Conservative Party.
On Easter Monday, Greenpeace
activists blocked the outfall...
from the Atomic Weapons Establishment
at Aldermaston.
Robinson had read that
the growth of high technology industry...
in the M4 corridor was triggered...
by the number of government research
establishments in the Reading area.
On the centenary of the Martian landing
on Horsell Common near Woking...
which was so vividly described
by H.G. Wells...
Robinson took me to see the crater.
He told me that there were more than
100 patents in microelectronics...
nanotechnology and other fields
for uses of Buckminsterfullerenes...
the large, spherical carbon molecules...
discovered in cosmic dust
by British and other scientists...
but they are all held abroad.
[Solemn instrumental music]
The Martians destroyed most of Surrey.
500 tons of Mars is estimated
to land on Earth each year.
[Birds chirping]
On St George's Day...
a group of campaigners occupied land
at Wesley, near St George's Hill...
the private estate developed in 1911
on former common land...
where the diggers had set up camp in 1649.
"We are challenging
the government's whole philosophy...
"about the pre-eminence of property
rights," said their spokesman...
an Oxford University Fellow.
Robinson had not found
any Buckminsterfullerenes...
in the crater at Horsell Common,
but he was impressed...
by the technology of the
latter-day levellers.
On the 28th, the eve
of World No Golf Day...
they occupied the golf course
at St George's Hill.
May the 4th was the day
of the local elections.
Despite the poor air quality,
we set out for a walk...
in the Bluebell Woods towards Henley...
and came across
a group of satellite dishes...
at a location
we've been asked not to name...
which are the television receivers
for the BBC's World Monitoring Service...
a few miles away at Caversham Park,
established during World War ll.
With the coincidence of the Tory election
defeat and the V-E Day anniversary...
there was a lot of talk
about the 1945 election...
and how laissez-faire
had been kept off the political agenda...
until those who participated
in the war at decision-making level...
had departed from the scone.
Robinson says that unless
Labour wins a landslide victory
in the general election...
there is always a Conservative majority
in England.
Henley is the constituency
of Michael Heseltine...
then the president of the Board of Trade.
It was twinned with
Baroma, Somalia in 1981.
As we walked back to Reading...
we passed the preparations
for a celebration bonfire.
Robinson told me that he'd received
instructions from our employer...
and that the next day, we would begin
the first of seven journeys...
that were to be the basis of our project.
This method had been suggested
by his reading...
Daniel Defoe's Tour Through
the Whole Island of Great Britain...
which is based on Defoe's travels
as a spy for Robert Harley...
the government minister
in the reign of Queen Anne.
The narrative of Britain
since Defoe's time...
is the result of a particularly English
kind of capitalism.
With our contracts
and expense account agreed...
we set out to follow the Thames
downstream to the sea.
Passing Fawley Court,
a work of Sir Christopher Wren...
and the nearby tunnels
that allow toads to cross the road...
we came to the Henley Management College
and Research Centre at Greenlands...
which offers degree and NVQ courses
for individuals and corporate groups.
The village of Medmenham
is near the abbey ruins...
where the Hellfire Club
held their nocturnal revels.
The Shelleys moved to Albion House
in Marlow In 1817...
where she transcribed
his Revolt of Islam...
and prepared Frankenstein for publication.
Marlow is also home
to the UK headquarters...
of Volvo, Saab and Rank Xerox.
And at Cookham,
near the home of Stanley Spencer...
is the headquarters
of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
The Fountain of Love at Cliveden
was bought in Rome by William Waldorf...
the first Lord Astor, In 1897.
It was at Cliveden that John Profumo
first met Christine Keeler...
who was staying at a
cottage in the grounds.
She was naked beside the swimming pool.
The Astor's pro-appeasement stance...
and their entertainment of von Ribbentrop
and Oswald Mosley...
led to belief in the existence
of the Cliveden Set...
a conspiracy giving tacit support
to Hitler's conquest of Europe.
Cliveden's prominence has always rested...
on its proximity to London and its views.
The present house
is the work of Sir Charles Barry...
the architect of the
Palace of Westminster.
And the view along the river
was compared by Garibaldi...
with the mighty river prospects
of South America.
At Maidenhead, we passed beneath
Brunel's Bridge of 1837...
the longest-spanning brickbuilt arches
in Europe...
and the scene of Turner's
Rain, Steam, and Speed.
In a letter from Ethiopia...
Rimbaud imagined a son
who would become a famous engineer...
a man rich and powerful through science.
With the departure of Douglas Hurd
for the NatWest...
there remained three Old Etonians
in a Cabinet of 23.
About an eighth.
Between 1868 and 1955...
of the 294 Cabinet ministers
who held office...
over a quarter attended Eton...
so, either Eton is no longer what it was,
or more likely...
government is no longer an occupation
that is so necessary...
for Etonians to be concerned with.
We left the river bank at Windsor...
where the 180 mile riverside
park is blocked because it
passes through the Royal Estate.
The riverbank was enclosed
by Queen Victoria...
with an Act of Parliament in 1860...
despite the prohibition
of the Magna Carta...
which is displayed
at the memorial at Runnymede...
erected by the American Bar Association
in 1930.
Nearing Heathrow,
we came across a factory...
the first we'd seen since leaving Reading.
All the more unusual,
since most toys are made in China.
Bendy products are made in natural rubber.
Heathrow Airport, where the first
commercial flight took off in 1946...
is the busiest international airport
in the world.
Robinson didn't like to continue
into London...
fearing reprisals for his earlier study.
So, after a journey on the Underground and
many hours wandering lost in tunnels...
we emerged from the workings
of the Jubilee Line Extension...
near the site subsequently chosen
for the Millennium Exhibition...
and didn't stop until we reached Becton.
East Ham Churchyard,
opposite the Becton ski slope...
is the largest churchyard in England.
Robinson was hoping to find
some trace of the opium den...
frequented by Dorian Gray by following
the route described in the story...
but he couldn't find anyone to ask.
Coming soon on this site...
a Warner Brothers nine screen
multiplex cinema...
opening Easter, 1996.
We had read that Ford
was seeking government aid...
to build a new small car for Mazda...
but that their Dagenham plant was facing
competition from Valencia in Spain.
The development of Rainham Marshes
was, for the time being, unlikely...
as the Channel Tunnel
Rail Link Terminal...
had been confirmed at Ebbsfleet
on the south side of the estuary.
Robinson thought he'd discovered
Dracula's house, Carfax at Purfleet...
until I pointed out
that we were still in Rainham.
When we reached Purfleet...
he was surprised to find the view of
London unchanged since he had left...
despite both his predictions
of imminent ruin...
and various attempts
to link the Channel Tunnel...
with the regeneration of the
estuary, balancing the pull
of Heathrow in the west.
Robinson had purchased
a copy of Port Statistics...
a publication
of the Government Statistical Service...
and every night,
he pored over it with a calculator...
emerging from time to time
with some new revelation.
Port traffic continues to increase...
exports have increased
fivefold since 1965...
most rapidly in the late '70s,
when North Sea oil was first exploited.
Imports have fluctuated, but overall,
have risen by more than a fifth.
The Thames estuary
from Teddington to Foulness...
is still the leading port in the UK...
though, in foreign traffic...
the Humber ports outrank the total
for London and the Medway.
The docks at Tilbury, sold to its
employees in 1992 for £32 million...
was bought recently by Forth Ports PLC
for £132 million.
There is a house nearby where Daniel Defoe
wrote part of Robinson Crusoe.
Having spent the night at Tilbury
in the manner of the pilgrims...
we spent the morning at the Lakeside
Shopping Centre at Thurrock...
before crossing the river to Dartford.
Robinson was anxious to see the town
which is the birthplace...
of both Keith Richards and Mick Jagger
of The Rolling Stones.
It was Environment Week in Dartford.
We visited the landfill at Ebbsfleet...
where Blue Circle
proposed to build a new town...
alongside the Channel Tunnel Station...
and Donald Trump
is rumoured to be planning casinos.
Marlowe, the narrator
of Conrad's Heart of Darkness...
tells his story on a
ship lying off Gravesend.
On the following evening,
we reached the Isle of Sheppey.
The fully-automated plant at Windham...
produces 120 square metres
of plasterboard per minute...
the fastest-running production line
in Europe.
Coast Steel Sheerness
recycles scrap into steel rod and bar.
The Canadian company
evangelises total team culture...
in which overtime is unpaid
and union members fear identification.
The Port of Sheerness...
where 300 dockers
lost massive share profits...
through being made redundant
when they refused a pay cut...
is now owned by the
Mersey Dock and Harbour Company.
This was the end of our first journey.
The next day, we returned to Reading.
Two weeks later, we set off again
by the packhorse road...
over the hills towards Oxford.
The Oratory is an independent,
selective secondary school for boys.
We were pleased to have an opportunity...
to study the authorship of appearances
in the English countryside.
As we began our descent, we could
see the power station at Didcot...
which generates about 5%
of peak demand in England.
Near the river,
we came across a break in the hedge...
where an excavation crossed the road.
From Wittenham clumps,
we could see that it led to Didcot...
a gas pipeline to supply
a new power nation...
being built next to the existing one,
which runs on coal.
Didcot is operated by National Power.
[Birds chirping]
[Machinery humming in the distance]
The Wittenham Clumps were the magic
landscape of the painter Paul Nsah...
but we had to press on,
following the Thames upstream...
deeper into the interior of the country.
[Upbeat instrumental music]
On the evening of the 12th of June,
we arrived in Oxford...
the King's headquarters
in the Civil War...
and Hitler's preferred capital
had he occupied England.
Most of what was once
the Morris Motor Works at Cowley...
was demolished in 1993...
and the site is now a business perk
owned by British Aerospace...
who sold the Rover Group to BMW in 1994.
There's been little made of the fact...
that Bernd Pischetsrieder,
the chairman of BMW...
is the great-nephew
of the late Alec Issigonis...
whose innovative designs for Morris
and its successors...
could probably have given the company
a 10-year lead over Volkswagen...
in the European mass market.
At Magdalene,
pronounced "maudlin," College...
we visited the rooms once occupied
by Oscar Wilde...
who apparently enjoyed Oxford...
though its atmosphere
of stifled sexuality...
must have been even more striking than
than it is today.
The Fellows were not allowed to marry
until 1877...
and despite, or perhaps
because of the small numbers of women...
open homoeroticism is still most unusual.
The President showed us the new buildings
by Demetri Porphyrios...
which he described as examples
of the architecture of the future.
Our employer has suggested
we should buy a car.
While I was impressed by the favourable
reports of the current local product...
Robinson preferred the older 1100
we'd seen earlier.
I was sent to make the purchase,
and he went off to the Bodleian.
We visited Christ Church,
where as librarian...
Robert Burton lived a silent, sedentary,
solitary, private life.
The Anatomy of Melancholy
appeared In 1621...
under the pseudonym Democritus, Junior.
"The Jacobean melancholy, like our own,"
said Robinson...
"was the result of a disorientation.
"You and I are deeply
disillusioned people."
Burton was vicar of St
Thomas the Martyr...
between 1616 and his death in 1639.
The porch is his addition.
I think we were never so happy
as on the day of our pilgrimage...
to the memorials of Robert Burton.
The car was fitted with a radio.
It turned out
that it had belonged to a member...
of a successful Oxford pop group.
[Aeroplane engine humming]
Opposite the airport
is Campsfield House...
the privately-run detention centre
where up to 200 asylum seekers...
are held in prison-like conditions.
In April, the inexperience
of its management and staff...
had been severely criticised
by the Chief Inspector of Prisons.
Campsfield House is run
by Group 4 Security.
[Rock music]
"Whatever is fitted in any sort...
"to excite the idea of pain and danger...
"that is to say, whatever is
in any sort terrible," says Burke...
"is a source of the sublime."
[Rock music continues]
We had arranged to visit
the new Aston Martin works at Bloxham.
The literary stereotype
of the sadistic Englishmen...
endures in the drug excesses
of contemporary aristocrats...
and as James Bond.
Robinson had never paid much attention
to James Bond...
but he wondered
if we shouldn't have bought a faster car.
We passed the United States Air Force's
603 Communications Squadron...
at RAF Croughton...
and the Defence Clothing
and Textile Agency at Bicester.
In the afternoon, we came to Stowe...
described by the National Trust
as "Britain's largest work of art."
The house has been a public school
since 1923.
In the landscaped gardens...
based on Milton's description
in Paradise Lost...
is Kent's Temple of British Worthies...
where we paid our respects
to Milton for Pandemonium...
Shakespeare for Yorick...
and Locke
for Duration and its Simple Modes...
and the Succession of Ideas.
"For whilst we receive successively
ideas in our minds...
"we know that we do exist...
"and so we animate the existence...
"or the continuation of the existence
of ourselves."
At Bletchley Park,
Alan Turing built the machine...
that cracked the Enigma naval codes
In 1942.
On June the 10th,
we arrived in Milton Keynes...
visiting the multi-denominational
cathedral in Silbury Boulevard...
opposite the shopping centre.
We stayed in Milton Keynes for a
fortnight, leaving on July the second.
We couldn't find the site where the
Wiccans worship, which we'd read about...
but there is a holy wall at Stevington
which was easy to find.
That night, we slept in a shed.
It was never easy
to find a decent place to stay...
but we generally took whet was offered,
imagining that...
the problem of hotels in England
would be of interest to our employer.
We woke up outside what we thought
must be the biggest...
and is, apparently,
the busiest landfill in the country:
one of several sites
which had previously been exploited...
by the London Brick Company.
The next day's pilgrimages
were to the airship hangers...
at Carlington, and to Bedford.
[Bell tolling in the distance]
At a garage near St Neots...
as we were thinking of
trading in the 1100...
for an old Volvo
full of second-hand books...
we heard on the radio that John Major
had been re-elected...
leader of the Tory Party.
That evening, we reached Cambridge...
which we had thought
might be more congenial than Oxford.
Our employer had been unable to secure us
an invitation to dine at Peterhouse...
the oldest, the nastiest college...
so we couldn't confirm its reputation
for orgiastic revelry...
or gauge any lingering influence
of Maurice Cowling...
the unusually right-wing historian
who was Michael Portillo's tutor.
[Bell tolling]
In the morning,
we had a look at Jesus College...
where Laurence Sterne
was an undergraduate...
and where the patrons of architecture
of the future...
were, in our opinion, at least
better advised than those in Oxford.
After lunch
and several games of table football...
we drove off towards Felixstowe.
The Devil's Dyke marks the boundary
of Cambridge here in Suffolk...
soon after which we joined
the newly renamed A14 trunk road...
European Route E28,
which has cut journey time to the port.
St Edmundsbury is the town
of all this part of England...
in proportion to its bigness,
most thronged with gentry.
People of the best fashion
and the most polite conversation...
of which other writers
have talked very largely...
and perhaps a little too much.
Ipswich is still a considerable port,
probably more so than in Defoe's time...
with large tonnages
of cereals and animal feed.
But our destination
was the Port of Felixstowe...
which is owned by Hutchinson Whampoa,
tho Hong Kong group...
who, with British Aerospace
own the Orange Mobile Telephone network.
Felixstowe handles half of all
UK deep sea container traffic...
in which imports slightly
outweigh exports.
It is the fourth largest container port
in Europe, 15th in the world.
[Machine beeping]
We were booked on the 11:00 ferry
to Zeebrugge...
Robinson said that he had to meet
our employer at a conference in Lille.
I spent a few days resting...
then set off to walk along the
coast of Calais where we had
arranged to meet at the ferry.
I visited some friends I hadn't seen
for several years...
and spent a weekend with Bray-Dunes,
where I lived In the early 1970s.
Freight through Dover has increased
tenfold since 1965.
Despite the tunnel, over half the UK's
international goods vehicle traffic...
still runs through the port.
One million vehicles per year.
Nationally, roll-on roll-off traffic
is about equal to that in containers...
but the rate of increase
has been much greater.
It's always difficult
coming back to England.
But we were expected in Brighton,
and soon forgot our bad thoughts.
The Victory, Nelson's flagship
is preserved at Portsmouth...
and is the principal monument
of the 18th century British Navy...
the largest industrial unlit of its day
in the western world...
on whose supremacy was built
the capitalism of land...
finance and commercial services
centred on the city of London...
which dominates the economy
of the south of England.
Those of us aesthetes
who view the passing of the visible
industrial economy with regret...
and who longed for
an authenticity of appearance...
based on manufacturing
and innovative modern design...
are inclined to view
this English culture...
as a bizarre and damaging anachronism.
But if so, it is not an unsuccessful one.
Our visit to Portsmouth coincided with
that of a group of Sandhurst cadets.
In the afternoon, we visited Southampton,
home port of the Titanic...
where the Spitfire was developed...
and the new dark fibre optic
were invented at the University.
"A sea port ls a pleasant
place for a soul...
"worn out with life's struggles,"
says Baudelaire.
"The wide expanse of the sky,
the mobile clouds...
"the ever-changing colours of the sea..."
A ship like the P&O's Colombo Bay
has a crew of 20...
and carries up to 4,200 containers...
each one of which may be
the full load of an articulated lorry.
The M3 at Twyford Down had opened
in the previous October.
At Newbury, the bypass
had been confirmed...
a few days after
the Tory leadership election...
and people were already
living in the trees.
Towards Dorchester,
we passed Charborough Park.
Col Henry Drax left Yorkshire after
the Civil War and settled in Barbados...
where, in a few years,
from £300 in sugar plantations...
he acquired an estate
of £8,000 to £9,000 a year.
His successor married the heiress
of the Earls of Charborough.
Following the Enclosure Acts...
agricultural wages in Dorset had dropped
to nine shillings a week.
George Loveless and others tried
to get the wages increased...
but they were lowered to six shillings.
"We have injured no man's reputation,
character, person or property.
'"We were uniting together to protect
ourselves, our wives and our children...
"from utter degradation and starvation."
In England, 1.1% of employees
work in agriculture.
A coffee shop assistant at Tesco
eans £3.53 an hour.
We very often ate in supermarkets.
For the provincial spy
or anyone in a hurry...
who needs petrol, parking,
telephone, postal services...
clean toilets and palatable food,
there's really no practical alternative.
On the other side of Dorchester
is Poundbury...
the project of the Prince of Wales...
which with the magazine Perspectives
and the Institute of Architecture...
is the outcome of his 10-year opposition
to contemporary architecture.
The project was planned,
apparently with some difficulties...
by the architect Leon Krier...
and has been executed by the Percy Thomas
Partnership of Cardiff.
Our arrival in Yeovil
coincided with that of Tim Eggar...
the Trade and Industry minister,
who was to announce that...
Westland had been awarded
a £25 billion order...
to build American attack helicopters
for the Army...
in preference to the domestic options
offered by British Aerospace and GEC.
Westland is new owned by GKN.
For the rest of the day, we looked
at some non-agricultural land uses.
We knew of six Jane Austen
film or television adaptations underway...
all involving country houses,
mostly in the west of England.
Sense and Sensibility was made
at Montacute.
We called at Worthy Farm near
Glastonbury where the festival
site was being cleared...
and Halecombe Quarry at Leigh-on-Mendip.
The DOE believes that
the demand for aggregates...
could more than double
in the next 20 years.
On the 14th July,
we reached the Bristol Channel.
We were expected at the Portbury Dock.
Bristol imports more cars
than any other port in the UK...
and had the best PR of
any port we visited.
Bristol is closer to the enormous markets
of the Americas, Australia...
and the Pacific rim
than any other port in the UK.
The port of Bristol is the only major
UK port to employ a permanent workforce.
There were 60,000 cars at Portbury...
ready for the new registration year
on August 1st...
including many Daewoos from South Korea,
new on the UK market.
Two weeks later, we came back
again to visit the automated
plasterboard factory...
on the coal stockyard to which material:
are conveyed directly from the ships.
The coal is mostly
from Richard's Bay in South Africa...
and is carried to power stations by train.
In Bristol, we visited
the LLandoger Trow...
where Defoe is supposed to
have met Alexander Selkirk,
the real Robinson Crusoe.
LLandoger Trow was a boat that carried
coal to Bristol from South Wales
In Richard Jeffries' After London...
the red rocks of Bristol
are the western extremity...
of the lake that has covered
most of southern England...
and the Severn is silted up.
Robinson had been
most affected by the book...
which we'd heard one night
being read on the radio...
and had mistaken for a documentary.
Although it was then the hottest day of
the year, we walked out onto the bridge.
In the afternoon, we visited Filton.
Our employer had given Robinson a copy...
of Capitalism, Culture and
Decline In Britain, 1750-1990...
by W.D. Rubinstein...
who notes the close and harmonious
connection before 1832...
between city finance, land,
the professions and the government...
as contractor, loan agent and originator
of old corruption...
the extraordinary system
of lucrative perquisites...
which came to fortunate aristocrats,
government employees and their relatives.
The British government itself acted
as the central matrix of this system...
directly through contracts and perquisite,
indirectly by maintaining...
British control of the seas,
the Empire and the balance of power.
"Britain's role as the world's
fifth largest trading nation...
"is essential for its economic
well-being," said Lord
Mackey, the Lord Chancellor...
during the first reading
of the Intelligence Services Bill in 1993.
It was very hot.
The Defence Evaluation
and Research Agency at Malvern...
is a world centre for liquid crystal
and semiconductor research.
"They talk much of mines
of gold and silver," said Defoe...
"which are certainly to be found here,
if they were but looked for...
"and that Malvern would outdo Potosi."
It was the driest summer
since records began.
We wanted to have a look
at Blakenhurst Prison near Redditch...
run by UK Detention Services...
one of six Bullingdon type prisons
based on an original design...
by Building Design Partnership.
Merry Hill near Dudley
is the largest shopping centre in Europe.
More than four and a half million people
are within 65 minutes drlve.
It is connected to the nearby
waterfront development by a monorail...
though this was not operating
on the day of our visit.
At the top of the hill are the offices
of the Child Support Agency.
The waterfront and Merry Hill
were built on the site...
of the former Round Oak Steel Works.
Merry Hill attracts 25 million
shopping visits a year...
and its effects are felt
in towns 200 miles away.
Robinson wanted to visit Halesowen...
to see the factory where
the supergun parts have been produced.
We were both ill
from the cumulative effects...
of months of bad food
and living in hotels...
and were becoming seriously worried
about the weather.
Robinson imagined
the entire landscape occupied...
in manufacturing goods for export
to the Middle East.
The West Midlands are traditionally
the region where elections are decided.
In the Dudley West by-election
the previous December...
Labour's winning share of the vote had
been their biggest in any by-election...
in a Tory seat since 1933.
On August 11th,
we reached West Bromwich...
where we had come to see
the headquarters of Hyundai, UK...
which is part-owned by a company
called International Motors.
Their Phoenix International
Industrial Estate...
is next to the factory
of Phoenix Drawn Tube.
In an essay by the geographer
Doreen Massey, we had read:
"Amid the Ridley Scott visions
of world cities...
"the writing about skyscraper fortresses,
Baudrillard visions of hyperspace...
"most people still live in places
like Halston or West Bromwich."
Across the road is a chemical
manufacturing company
called Robinson Brothers.
Robinson introduced himself
to the managing director
and explained our project.
We were very generously looked after for
the next two weeks while we convalesced.
"Much of life, for many people,"
read Robinson...
"even in the heart of the first world...
"consists of waiting in a bus shelter
with your shopping...
"for a bus that never comes."
The bus shelter was opposite the promises
of Smallmen Lubricants.
When the bus finally arrived,
Robinson had disappeared...
to a sexual encounter with a stranger
he contacted through the internet...
while we were waiting at the bus stop.
Our employer had equipped us with
a notebook computer and a mobile phone.
We walked over to the Hiatt Works
in Great Barr.
Hiatt is one of the oldest firms
in Birmingham.
Established In 1780
in the era of the slave trade...
who make handcuffs and other items...
and whose name recently still appeared
on leg irons used in Saudi prisons.
Robinson went in
and bought a pair of handcuffs.
Beneath Spaghetti Junction,
we met a man with a dog...
who said he'd been paid
for denouncing illegal immigrants...
who'd been working on repairs
to the structure.
We were very relieved to reach the
Jaguar body plant at Castle Bromwich...
where Ford had secured government
investment for X-200 small saloon.
This is the factory where thousands of
Spitfires were built during World War ll.
The next day, we left Birmingham.
Neither of us knows
anything about Johnson...
except that The Anatomy of
Melancholy was the only book
that ever took him out of bed...
two hours earlier than he wanted to rise.
We crossed the River Trent
to Burton where we stayed the
night and woke up very early.
[Fast-paced instrumental music]
The day we arrived in Derby...
Rolls Royce announced half year profits up
43% to £70 million...
though the chairman would not rule out
more job losses...
and the shares fell 8%.
"The English are acknowledged
world leaders in fetishism and S&M"'...
Robinson road in the paper.
The only company in the world that makes
latex sheeting suitable for fetish wear...
is based in Derbyshire.
We wanted to visit Robin Hood's Well,
near Eastwood...
but the Wood had been fenced off
by the owner.
We did not go any further
in this direction.
We turned towards the northwest...
and the next morning set off towards
Liverpool, following the Derwent Valley.
[Fast-paced instrumental music resumes]
[Birds calling]
Tesco is still expanding
in the north of England.
The distribution centre at Middlewich
holds 43 million cases...
about 9 days' stock for 120 stores...
and delivers as far away as Gateshead.
Six more superstores are scheduled to open
in the north by May 1997.
[Fast-paced instrumental music resumes]
On September 4th, we arrived in Liverpool.
In the statistics for 1993...
the Mersey Dock and Harbour Company
wee the most profitable...
of any port authority listed.
In the last 30 years,
Liverpool's traffic has fluctuated...
more than that of any other UK port.
It is now about the same as in 1965...
three times more than in the early '80s...
and Liverpool is one of
the biggest ports in England.
Liverpool imports coal for Powergen
from the USA and Columbia...
and exports enormous tonnages of scrap...
mostly to the Far East and Spain.
The company did not want us
to photograph the scrap.
Not long after our visit,
they sacked 329 dock workers...
for refusing to cross a picket line.
When dockers in New York
began secondary protests...
the ACL container line...
said it would leave Liverpool
unless the lock-out there was ended.
And the Mersey Company's share value
dropped by £70 million.
The biggest shareholder
in the Mersey Dock and Harbour Company...
is the Treasury.
Our next appointments were in Warrington.
The Thorn Cross
Young Offender institution...
which had been chosen to become
the first US-style boot camp...
and the KinderCare Nursery,
the first to open in the UK.
KinderCare runs over a thousand centres
in 38 American states.
Warrington is near the crossing point
of two motorways...
and has attracted many
large distribution centres.
We stayed the night in a
Whitbread Travel Inn near Wigan...
that had opened the previous week.
Our rooms were quite new.
No one had ever stayed in them before.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway
opened on September 18th, 1830.
Robinson took me to see the memorial
to William Huskisson...
the Cabinet Minister
who was knocked down by the rocket...
as it passed the dignitaries
gathered for the occasion.
British Coal closed
Parkside Colliery in 1993...
and cleared the site after
an 18-month-long women's protest vigil.
They proposed a massive distribution
centre for Morrison's Supermarket...
with 5,000 vehicle movements daily.
The coal used to go by train
to Fiddler's' Ferry Power Station...
which is now supplied from the terminal
we'd seen in Liverpool Docks.
We had lunch in a brand new
Marks and Spencer...
on the edge of Warrington.
Robinson told me he had a relative...
who emigrated to Canada
from Warrington in 1935.
He walked to the locks at Latchford and
boarded one of the Manchester liners...
that sailed to the Great Lakes
until the late '70s.
We arrived in Manchester
on September 19th.
In 1937...
Turing published his paper
on computable numbers.
Two years later, he joined the Code
and Cipher School at Bletchley Park...
in the team that cracked
the German Navy's Enigma Code...
so that convoys could dodge
U-boats in the North Atlantic.
He continued his computer work
at Manchester University...
becoming Director of
the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine.
In 1954...
a police investigation
of a burglary at his home...
led to his being charged
with gross indecency.
He pleaded guilty
and was put on probation...
on condition that he submitted
to hormone treatment.
Shortly afterwards, he killed himself...
by eating en apple
impregnated with cyanide.
He was 42.
[Solemn instrumental music]
Murray's Mill in Ancoats
was built in 1798.
It is the world's oldest
steam-driven mill...
and as such,
is described as the first factory.
Engels visited Ancoats
frequently in 1842...
when working for the firm of
Erman and Engels in Manchester.
His Condition of the Working Class
in England...
was published in 1845 in Leipzig...
but not in Britain until 1892.
We stayed in another Travel Inn
at Milnrow, near Rochdale...
which had been open for about a month.
These places always seem to be hosting
conferences for their own executives.
John Milne was a civil engineer
with a passion for volcanoes.
He travelled overland to Tokyo...
where he was Professor
of Geology and Mining...
and developed the seismograph.
He wrote many books,
including some science fiction.
We had ascended the Pennines
at Blackstone Edge...
by the route of Daniel Defoe.
When we arrived at Yorkshire Waters
Reservoir near Ripponden...
there were 24 tankers waiting to
load water to be taken into Halifax.
At the time,
there were altogether 40 lorries...
working from this
reservoir, 24 hours a day.
Later in the year, there were
as many as 1,000 tankers...
moving water in West Yorkshire.
Near the treatment works in Halifax...
someone told us
where they'd just seen another leak.
So we went and had a look.
We had an appointment at the wind farm...
on Oxenhope Moor, above the town.
We're both very fond of Halifax.
It was the first place
we'd had a decent cup of coffee in months.
At Saltaire, north of Bradford...
Pace Microtechnology make
digital television equipment for export...
to the Far East and Australasia.
The V&A never managed to
move their South Indian collection...
to the Lister Mill in Bradford,
but the police station is new.
In Leeds, the site of
the famous Quarry Hill flats...
is now occupied by
the Dept of Social Security.
Junction 27 is a leisure park...
Wakefield 41 is a distribution estate
where Morrison have their depots.
"On the threshold of our century,"
Henri Bergson wrote...
"If realty could immediately reach
our senses and our consciousness...
"if we could come into direct contact
with things and with each other...
"probably art would be useless,
or rather, we should all be artists."
While we were in Wakefield,
Robinson met someone who told him that...
Bergson's mother came from Doncaster.
There are three prisons in Doncaster.
The largest is run by a subsidiary of the
American Wackhut Corporation.
It has the cheapest cost per prisoner
in the UK...
a non-union staff,
and a record of violence and chaos.
Doncaster prison was designed
by Seifert Limited.
Bentley used to be one of the
most left-wing pits in Yorkshire.
When it closed, it was producing
the UK's cheapest coal...
undercutting oven Columbian imports.
There were 600,000 tonnes
stock piled at the pit.
RJB owned 17 of the 31 surviving pits
and have contracts...
with the power generators until 1998.
There are 1,000 miners
still working in the industry...
1% of the number in 1946.
The advancement of Stella Remington,
MI5's former director...
followed her role
directing sabotage of the miners' strike.
And the amateur interventions
of David Hart...
Old Etonian and former bankrupt...
began with his funding
strike-breaking miners.
He is new unpaid advisor to Michael
Portillo at the Ministry of Defence.
A third of all UK deep-mined coal
is burnt at Drax.
Hugo Drax was James Bond's opponent
in Monnraker.
On October 5th,
we entered the network area...
of Kingston Communications
on the north bank of the Humber.
Kingston Communications
ls owned through the City Council...
by the citizens of Hull.
Robinson took me to the fish dock.
He had read how the Navy used to recruit
trawler men as unpaid spies.
Daniel Defoe was happy
to welcome William III to England.
This statue was erected
in the year 1734...
to the memory of King William III,
our great deliverer.
Robinson and I are proud to recollect
our own experiences...
of the glorious revolution.
Robinson Crusoe sailed from Hull
on September 1st, 1651.
Kingston Communications
has invented in a satellite...
and has a worker-director on its board.
William Wilberforce was
born in Hull In 1759.
Hull is the eastern English port
on the Dublin to Berlin motorway.
In the last century,
the traffic was the other way...
as more than a million emigrants
from Central and Eastern Europe...
passed through the port on their way
to Liverpool in the new world.
Many settled in Yorkshire,
including perhaps the Levisons...
whose daughter Catherine
wee Henri Bergson's mother.
We crossed the estuary to Immingham.
To materialists like us, lmmingham is
the second largest port in the UK.
And yet, there are few ships
and we saw no seafarers.
Ships come in and out on a single tide,
no one has time to get off.
Volvo, Saab and BMW import cars...
but most of the traffic is in
bulk fuel and iron ore...
which involves very little labour.
Three million tonnes of coal a year
are imported through Immingham.
Hull's biggest private sector employer
is British Aerospace at Brough...
where it builds Hawks
for export to Indonesia.
We visited Scarborough to confirm the
details of Rimbaud's promontory palace.
Rimbaud was in Java in 1876.
In the afternoon, we sat on a bench
outside St Mary's Church, Whitby.
It is about 100 years since the Demeter
arrived in Whitby Harbour...
It's 50 great wooden boxes of earth
were consigned to Mr. Samuel Billington...
a Whitby solicitor, who had them sent
on to Purfleet by train.
Capt. James Cook began his career
as ship's boy on the Freelove.
On the evening of the 11th of October,
we arrived in Redcar.
British Steel's plant at Redcar is one of
the four major steel works in the country.
It produces 70,000
tonnes of steel a week...
70% of which is exported,
much of it to the Far East...
and employs hardly any people.
The steel industry's
current export surplus...
is about three quarters
of a billion pounds.
Wilton is one the biggest
chemical production sites in Europe.
It produces about 40
intermediate products.
The chemical industry's export surplus
is about £4 billion.
The service sector's share of exports
has declined since 1960
as a result of the mere extinction
of the merchant shipping fleet.
The Tees is the UK's biggest single port.
It imports iron ore and coal...
and exports oil and petroleum products.
Unemployment in Middlesbrough is 17%,
the highest in the country...
which has the least regulated labour
market in the industrialised world...
and the highest prison population
of any country in Europe.
We stopped to watch the Queen arrive
at the Samsung site at Wynyard Perk.
With £58 million of government aid...
Samsung have invested
£450 million in a plant...
which employs between
500 and 600 people...
producing microwave ovens
and computer monitors.
There was a small demonstration
by their committee...
to defend socialism in South Korea.
Wynyard Park is the
estate of Sir John Hall...
the developer of
the Gateshead Metro Centre.
He bought it in 1981 for £3 million
from the Marquis of Londonderry...
whose family were formerly coal owners...
and has developed golf courses,
housing estates and a hotel...
which was not the one we stayed in.
In the morning,
we travelled south to Shandy Hall.
Here dwelt Laurence Sterne,
many years incumbent of Coxwold.
Here he wrote Tristram Shandy
and A Sentimental Journey.
He died in London in 1768.
Near Harrogate, we passed...
the US National Security Agency's
installation at Menwith Hill.
This is the largest signals
intelligence base in the world...
and eavesdrops telephone
and other communications.
Some of the most sensitive of which
concern the exploitation...
of Buckminsterfullerenes.
Robinson is beginning to act strangely.
As we came down from the Pennines,
we passed Samlesbury...
and he tried to get past the security.
In Preston, he went to
another British Aerospace plant...
but it had been demolished.
He kept trying to tell
me about David Hart...
and his attempts to get the MID
to abandon the Tornado...
and lease second-hand F-16s...
about Gothic cathedrals...
and that Hollywood had overtaken
aerospace as the leading US export.
On the evening of 23rd of October...
he told me he was going out to steal
a piece of equipment...
from one of the Saudi Arabian Tornadoes.
Blackpool is Robinson's home town.
His parents used to have a nursery...
which specialised in
strains of giant vegetables.
He explained that life on earth
evolved after the arrival...
of Buckminsterfullerenes in meteorites.
He showed me where the Wellington Bomber
was built with the geodetic structure...
invented by Barnes Wallis.
We arrived in Blackpool
on the second day of Diwali...
and the last week of the illuminations.
Robinson says that Blackpool
holds the key to his Utopia.
He often repeated
Chamfort's favourite saying:
"In each man's life,
there comes the moment...
"when his heart must either burst
or turn to stone."
Blackpool stands between us
and revolution.
Radiation levels in the
Irish Sea are higher...
than in any sea, anywhere in the world.
We cross the lrish Sea to Barrow...
where the third Trident submarine
was nearing completion.
Robinson said he had to be in Newcastle
by the end of the week.
Then he said he needed a day off
to visit a relation.
He took me to the dump at Drigg
where radioactive waste...
is stored in deteriorating conditions...
and to the site
whore Nirex is proposing to build...
an underground repository for plutonium
and other high-level waste.
At Sellafield, the 1963 reactors'
heat exchangers...
were being removed as the first stage
of dismantling the reactor.
The Thorpe reprocessing plant
had finally started up...
In February 1995.
He said it was unlikely ever
to be even an economic proposition.
He told me that the plutonium aftermath
of the nuclear industry...
will remain lethal
for quarter of a million years.
At Wordsworth's birthplace...
I thought he was going to go in
and register a complaint.
On the 30th of October, without warning...
we were told
our contracts had been terminated...
and we heard on the car radio that
a Tornado had crashed in the North Sea.
I cannot tell you where Robinson
finally found his Utopia.
[Birds chirping]
[Solemn instrumental music]
[Music intensifies]
[Solemn instrumental music continues]