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.