CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 13 INFRASTRUCTURE Editorial The big picture Gasholders at Kings Cross repurposed for housing (Photo: Jonathan Taylor) Conserving infrastructure can be difficult. It’s often big, making it expensive to maintain or repurpose. It reflects the technology of its time and may be no longer useful. It may be part of a system that is still in use. Remember the Big Dig, the nickname of the Boston Central Artery/Tunnel Project, which rerouted Interstate Highway 93 from the elevated Central Artery highway through a tunnel after it had cut off the city centre from its waterfront for four decades? When the new road opened in 2003, five years late and wildly over budget, a former director of the project described it as ‘doing open heart surgery on a patient who continues to work and play tennis’. US Representative Barney Frank commented that it would have been cheaper to elevate the city than depress the artery (which was probably inspired by producer Lew Grade’s comment about his film Raise the Titanic: ‘It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic’). Infrastructure consists of the basic physical and organisational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. Building it in the first place is often unpopular, generally due to its size, expense and unfamiliarity. John Ruskin, for example, was a vehement opponent of railways, seeing them as symbols of materialism and greed. It certainly was not worth trying to make them beautiful. ‘There never was more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything concerned with railroads or near them,’ he wrote in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). ‘Keep them out of the way, take them through the ugliest country you can find, confess them the miserable things they are, and spend nothing upon them but for safety and speed.’ If he were around today, Ruskin would be considering whether to support the UK’s most expensive infrastructure projects, which probably (‘probably’, because the likely eventual cost of any major infrastructure project is always a mystery) include High-Speed Rail 2, Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C nuclear power stations, the Lower Thames Crossing road project, and the Thames Tideway Tunnel super sewer. Time adds a new dimension to our appreciation of infrastructure, like any other type of heritage. We are taken back to the past to marvel at what was achieved with such sophistication and at what scale. Impressive structures – cranes, ironworks, cooling towers or whatever else – become symbols of the industries that shaped places. Sometimes, with imagination, they can provide the structure for a new activity that their hard-headed, original creators never thought of. And a time-travelling Ruskin might be surprised to discover that it is often those unadorned structures for which no one thought it worth paying for a ‘portion of ornament’ that most impress us today with their beauty and power.
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