4 C O N T E X T 1 2 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 2 From The Trains We Loved by Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis (1947) were invisible, but if you woke in the small hours you had their occasional distant roar the other side of the ridge for company, and in the daytime there was the glorious occupationcrossing only half a mile away. On that crossing I learnt to flatten farthings into ha’pennies; there I learnt, without giving it a name, to recognise a Drummond T9 as the most beautiful engine at the age of two years and two months… Imagine, then, St Pancras on an early summer night of 1876! The place is familiar even to visitors out of the future. Gilbert Scott’s façade of proud and shameless Victorian Gothic, and Barlow’s incomparable roof, are just eight years old; nobody knows what blows will some day strike them from the unimagined air, or how they will survive those blows. No, this is the summer of 1876 and the Settle and Carlisle line has been open for all traffic since May Day. It is really an admirable thing, this new Midland Scotch express. Euston and King’s Cross have their eyes on it, for it is a much finer train than anything the North Western or the Great Northern can show as yet. The Midland, moreover, is competing with both; partnership with the Glasgow and South Western – the wee Sou’-West which nobody else in England took seriously – is getting Midland trains into Glasgow, while the North British has joyously double-crossed its East Coast allies and is running Midland expresses into Edinburgh by the Waverley route. Those were the trains we loved; grand, elegant and full of grace. We knew them, and they belonged to the days when we first gazed on the magic of cloud shadows sweeping over the Downs, when we first became fully aware of the smell of a Wiltshire village after rain, or when we first saw a Scottish mountain framed in a rainbow so vivid that no painter dare to try to record it; to the days when, unadvised and at random, we discovered and first read Jefferies’ Bevis. Those were the days when we first looked with the uncomprehending pleasure of early boyhood on a beautiful woman in a flowing BurnesJonesian dress, when we first heard with awed and incredulous delight the music of Elgar, and they were the days when the steam locomotive, unchallenged, bestrode the world like a friendly giant… Where the express had raced, the local ambled; where the express had played something like Schumann’s Arabesque on the rail joints, the local played a gentle pavan. It gave you time to study the outline of Wilton’s great Italianesque church, the thatched roof of Barford St Martin, the solemn line of the Downs and the lovely, lovely valley of the Nadder. And when at last we left it, there would be the same ponytrap with the same brown mare, the same ride to the same three-centuryold house with the pomegranate tree on the south wall. There the trains ‘By attacking a sub-sector of the economy that is difficult to quantify, in a move expected to be of relatively little benefit to the Exchequer, the government has abandoned its responsibility to the historic environment. this is particularly alarming since less than one week after the budget the government explicitly acknowledged ‘the wider social, cultural, economic and environmental benefits that conservation of the historic environment can bring’ in the new National Planning Policy Framework.’ From an industry-wide (including the IHBC) letter of representation urging the Chancellor of the Exchequer to reverse the decision to remove the zero rate of VAT on approved alterations to listed buildings announced in the budget. ‘The proposals will use the VAT regime to penalise further lowcarbon, high-skilled maintenance and regeneration opportunities – often community-based when they involve the heritage sector – in favour of high-carbon alternatives already readily funded through more mainstream industries that focus on demolition, disposal and new-build.’ The IHBC commenting on the government’sVAT changes. ‘Vital alterations to churches should not be compared to installing luxury swimming pools.’ The Church of England on theVAT changes. ‘“Greenest government” encourages refurb by adding VAT to listed building changes. Brilliant.Were they holding instructions upside down?’ Steven Bee on Twitter (@urbancounsel) ‘INTHE CONTEXT of the deeply damaging cap on philanthropy and the cap on community investment tax relief, this VAT change sends a terrible message about the government’s commitment to the big society and localism agendas.’ Sir Stephen Bubb of the Association of Chief Executives ofVoluntary Organisations
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