Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

No one regrets a railway once it’s built

issue 14 January 2012

Infrastructure. Still reading this? Well done, because the word alone will have lost half my readers at first sight.

Infrastructure is a big idea dogged by a dreadful modern name. If Thomas Telford, John Rennie, Joseph Paxton, Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Joseph Bazalgette had been informed as little boys that they were to dedicate their lives’ work to something called infrastructure, they’d probably have become tinkers or tailors instead. No, in their minds it was the great glories of 18th- and 19th-century Britain that they were to build and have the honour of being forever associated with their names: roads, canals, bridges, fountains, gardens, towns, tunnels and railways. Ferdinand de Lesseps thought of himself as the genius behind the Suez canal, not a key contributor to North African infrastructure.

Infrastructure is our family silver as a nation. It is our inheritance and our legacy. It helps define our greatness and our greatest days.

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