12 CONTEXT 176 : JUNE 2023 IAN WRAY Idealists, colonialists and engineers Underlining the importance of industrial heritage and technology depends on new ways of telling the story, perhaps through a new statutory designation of national heritage areas. Danny Boyle’s unforgettably spectacular opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics paid homage to all the usual symbols of Britain’s cultural and creative achievement.The examples ran from the boat race, punk rock, Sergeant Pepper uniforms and maypoles, through to Elgar, medieval village greens, cricket, Shakespeare, the suffragettes and the National Health Service. But pride of place was given to one great phenomenon, with the village green transformed into industrial Britain, maypoles replaced by towering, smoking chimneys and villagers replaced by the toiling urban masses, all supervised by top-hatted Victorian entrepreneurs and starring Kenneth Branagh as the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It was a shrewd choice (if we can overlook the fact that Brunel was half French), as the industrial revolution is by common consent the long event that transformed Britain. Stonehenge may be an intriguing relic, but it is ultimately no more than that. Britain’s industrial society changed the world and, especially in the fastgrowing nations of the far east, it does so today. It was forged in large part not by elites and experts, but by ordinary people in ordinary provincial places. Boyle had understood the common power of industry and its place in the national psyche. Consciously or not, the process of identifying and inscribing UK-based world heritage sites has reflected the central importance of industrial heritage and technology. No less than a third of the inscribed sites (10 out of 27 sites on the UK mainland) have this theme. They are Blaenavon Industrial Landscape, Wales; the Slate Landscapes, Wales; Mining Landscapes of Cornwall and West Devon, England; Derwent Valley Mills, England; Forth Bridge, Scotland; Ironbridge Gorge, England; New Lanark, The south end of The Forth Bridge, viewed from the Hawes Pier in Queensferry, a few months before its inscription in 2015 (Photo: Miles Oglethorpe, Historic Environment Scotland)
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