Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built is out from Faber. He is working on a book about technology in Britain since the 1970s.
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Vol. 24 No. 11 · 6 June 2002
pages 28-33 | 10130 words
Love that Bird
Francis Spufford
August 1974. Compared to the Cortinas and Maxis in the carpark, the prototype Concorde taxiing onto the runway at RAF Fairford looked astonishingly modern: but then, it always would. For the next quarter of a century, it would always be an object that stood out from its context, stylistically disconnected from the machines people build for more everyday tasks. Even now, when the carparks at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle are filled with sleek creations, art-directed to the max by Mercedes and Renault to convey futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the Universe and a message from tomorrow has been poked through. Age has, however, made it clear that the tomorrow in question is yesterday’s tomorrow; and age has shown too, of course, in the gradual revelation of the design’s practical flaws, such as the unsolved question of how to protect the wings from the wheels, which in July 2000 brought down Air France Flight AF4590 in a scrawl of flame.
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 12 · 27 June 2002
From Hugh Turner
According to Francis Spufford (LRB, 6 June), the whole Concorde project 'was based on an error in social prediction', in as much as the people who commissioned the plane presupposed that flying was and would remain 'something done by the rich'. I don't believe this for a second. Even by 1962, when the Concorde was first mooted, flying wasn't being done only by the rich, and given the degree to which it had already percolated down into the middlingly well-off, no one can have thought its future was going to be as exclusive as Spufford suggests. The thing about Concorde was that it was going to fly to wherever it went a whole lot quicker than other people carriers. I vaguely remember that around that time, Barnes Wallis, the bouncing bomb man from wartime, was proposing passenger rockets that would get people from London to Sydney via the upper air in 90 minutes or less, and since small conventional aircraft were already travelling at speeds unimaginable only ten years before, the building of something like Concorde was inevitable. The technological prediction was what counted, not the social one; the Concorde was surely foreseen as the icing on the cake, never as the future of air travel.
Hugh Turner
Sheffield
From Graham Brown
Perfect timing! Francis Spufford reminds us that BA paid £17 million to get Concorde, whose development had already cost taxpayers nearly £900 million. In the same week, the Government tells us that it's handing over the Millennium Dome (cost to us: over £700 million) to a bunch of property developers free of charge. Who'd be a taxpayer?
Graham Brown
King’s Lynn
From John Sullivan
Francis Spufford's article on Concorde contains one inaccuracy. Tony Benn's South-East Bristol constituency did not include Filton, the site of both the BA and Rolls-Royce factories. Filton is in South Gloucester, four miles away, so Benn's enthusiasm for Concorde was to do with technocratic zeal, not electoral calculation.
In Bristol today the schools are crumbling, bus services are inadequate, public housing provision declines, and no one flies on Concorde. In the recent municipal elections the Labour Party had to bring in people from more prosperous areas to canvass council estates. The future never used to look like this.
John Sullivan
Bristol
From D. Duggan
I wonder if Francis Spufford is aware that this amazing aeroplane is also a full foot longer in the air than when standing on the runway prior to take-off. My source for this is the rather less rigorous Jeremy Clarkson (Speed, BBC2). Legroom is apparently unaffected.
D. Duggan
Beckenham, Kent
