No one regrets a railway once it’s built

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. It is the very furniture of a dynamic political economy. So I’m delighted it’s back in the news, back in fashion and back on the agenda of forward-looking politicians. We are talking here of what we will leave the next generation to make their lives and livelihoods richer, their tasks easier, their journeys faster, their trade and industry stronger. At relatively modest cost and nuisance to ourselves we can bequeath the young better cities and a better country to live and work and make their way in. Infrastructure is investment, in the best, most old-fashioned sense of the word.

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Matthew Parris

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More people need to say this: to raise their heads from the costings and balance sheets, the revenue projections and contractors’ timetables, the endless public inquiries, and remind citizens of the bigger picture. Very little that modern man invests to build for future use and future ease is ever, in the end, regretted.