Saturday, 24 August 2019

Person Power


          The City of Bradford, once the wealthy, global hub of the worsted industry, is now a spent shell of a place, with no apparent purpose and no money. It is still a populous metropolis and its leaders are looking for solutions to its economic plight, but progress is patchy. The city holds little appeal for visitors: the evidence of poverty, decay and vandalism (the council demolished the handsome Victorian core in 1971 to build a road) is plain to see. Yet, for those who look closer, there is much to admire. There is some impressive surviving architecture and a rich seam of history, comprising stories of individuals and their achievements.
          One of these, Titus Salt, in the 1850s built the suburb of Saltaire, an enormous mill surrounded by a model village, incorporating schools, a church, a park and social, cultural and medical facilities for its workers. The business eventually collapsed in the 1960s, but the infrastructure, which survived intact, is now a designated World Heritage Site and the mill houses a gallery devoted to another famous Bradfordian, David Hockney. Everyone knows Hockney, but who, apart from those of us who were boys in the 1950s, has heard of the Jowett brothers? They were local engineers, whose legacy includes sleek, futuristic-looking cars, the Javelin and the Jupiter (as well as the more prosaic Bradford delivery van). The marvel is that they had the vision and the wherewithal to create such glamorous machines from the grim ruins of post-war austerity. Were they inspired by the fearless, evocatively-named Titus?
          I speak of Bradford because I have just been there, but examples of individuals whose ambition, vision and determination have helped move history along are to be found everywhere. Of course, the list includes people like Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Ghengis Khan, Donald Trump etc, but I want to concentrate on those whose intentions could be construed as benign and whose achievements as beneficial to society or humankind. Not all of them are well known. For example, there was Ada Salter who, at the turn of the 20th century, was the instigator of the Bermondsey Beautification Society. It may not sound much, but she planted flowers on the derelict plots around the borough – thereby pioneering urban guerrilla gardening – and, later, lined the streets with trees and improved the local parks. Ada’s vision did not catch on universally: for example, one hundred years later, trees were being planted on Manchester’s city streets for the first time. (Though, to be fair to Manchester, its lady visionaries of the time – the Pankhursts – were pretty much tied up with their Suffragette movement, another and arguably even more important social advance.)
          However, the quality of our environment is now at the forefront of urban planning – in principle, if not in practice – and, as usual, we have individuals to thank for driving the initiative, for it is evident that our health and welfare cannot be entrusted to politicians who are lobbied and funded by fossil-fuel and agro-chemical industries, whose concern for environmental protection and eco-sustainability is, at best, marginal.
          The names of our eco-warrior pioneers may not trip off our tongues as easily as the movements they founded – Greenpeace or Green Party – but the latest one to capture the limelight, Greta Thunberg, is likely to rectify that. She has several advantages in her favour: as well as being a schoolchild – guileless, straight-talking and au fait with the facts – her name is easy to spell and she has social media at her disposal. There are, inevitably, some people who dismiss her and, in doing so, dismiss the scientific prognosis of pending eco-catastrophe. Just how their minds work is a mystery to me, though Ogden Nash* may have nailed it when he wrote “The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.”
*Poet, 1902-1971.

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