Remember when Britain could build stuff?

Heathrow. The whole British story is there. Reading up around that debacle last week, I came across the eye-watering — and I think true — claim that, over the course of the second world war, Britain built 444 airfields. Four hundred and forty four. Although not all in the United Kingdom, probably. Some will have been in far-off lands, where Johnny Foreigner could be bought off in exchange for a pretty goat, or just shouted at, at gunpoint, until he went away. Hundreds, though, will have been here, on British soil — where it has now taken us over half an actual century to not quite build a new runway at Heathrow. 444. This is what we use to be able to do.

So also trains. Crossrail is finally happening, with holes dug and buildings torn down and built again; they can’t cancel it now. All 73 miles of it, largely underground, will be with us by 2019, a mere six decades since somebody first thought of it, and only four since they came up with the name. HS2 is more wobbly, admittedly, but we’ve only been thinking about that one since the 1980s. Go back to the railway mania of the mid-1800s, though, and we once laid 5,000 miles of railway in seven years.

Or there’s houses. Everybody knows we aren’t building nearly enough, and the ones we are building are half frauds anyway; existing dwellings chopped in half, bed in the annex and a loo in the broom cupboard. Because it’s hard, building houses, isn’t it? Neighbours complain, planning laws are complex and the finances bite you on the backside. Yet once, in a period of time equivalent to the 25-year span between John Major taking office and now, do you know what we managed to create? Pretty much all of recognisable Stevenage, Crawley, Hemel Hempstead, Harlow, Basildon, Corby, Milton Keynes, Redditch, Runcorn, Telford, Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield, Peterborough, Livingstone and Cumbernauld.