Daily photos no. 48: past futures

A salutary thing to do whenever, as is happening a lot right now,  someone's trying to sell you a new runway, a high speed train line or indeed a monorail is to look at past utopian ideas and compare them with the lived reality. This is one of my favourites: Telly Savalas – already famous as Kojak – was paid to pretend he'd visited various British cities undergoing regeneration. Here's the Birmingham one.



Not all Utopian schemes are bad of course, but they do all tend to be prey to the vested interests that always want more concrete, more consumption, more pollution and more control of people they think of as a mob. This is why Birmingham, having been flattened in the war, was then sentenced to generations of toxic air: the local car industry was determined to turn the-law into a fantasy of hyper mobility, showcasing its sleek but filthy wares.

Poor old Stoke similarly suffered. A coalition of six towns became a city. Then the trams were shut down and ring roads went in, encircling every one of the towns with a choking belt of poison, making them inaccessible on foot or by bike from each other. A desultory attempt was made to provide public transport but it was woeful. And so one day I found myself with half an hour spare amidst the faded glory of semi-abandoned Hanley Bus Station the product of an architect who'd seen the arcades of Renaissance Italian cities and a funding authority that hadn't. The mismatch between the original station and its accretions, and the ambition and the care not taken make me weep, especially when places like Preston have such pride in such mundane places as bus stops. Hanley has a new station now: not as whimsical but rather elegant. Still 3 miles from a train station…

This place used to do the best (worst) egg sandwiches. I used to collect my dole money, buy a Guardian and eat one while posing as a member of Blur, circa Modern Life is Rubbish. Which now feels genuinely decadent.