Several years ago, Martin Valatin, representing the (non-Orwellian) organization Architects for Peace and Social Responsibility, wrote glowingly about the Mathare squatter settlement in Kenya - a place where 400,000 human beings were forced to live in an abandoned quarry. “In spite of the crime, drugs and unsanitary congestion there’s a spatial richness in places like Mathare,” he said, “and a dynamic attitude to shelter which, to those used to a more product-oriented building industry, can seem quite refreshing.”
To the more crude architectural commentators, like Valatin, not even malnutrition and disease shatter the romance of the simple life, especially since the United Nations Habitat Declaration, the formal document on global strategies for human habitation, concludes that “those living in poverty are, in fact, rich in innovative faculties”. Some might say that it’s incredible what people can do with a tarpaulin and a sheet of cardboard, but relativising the issue of underdevelopment has had serious consequences for the Developed World.
Redefining ‘progress’ and ‘development’ into a value judgment goes back a long way. In the same year that Gro Harlem Brundtland was coining the phrase ‘sustainable development’, the 1989 Caracas Report on Alternative Development Indicators suggested that “if governments of the South can create a consensus amongst themselves around lists of indicators (such as ‘net forest destruction’, ‘extinction of species’, ‘secondary school enrollment’ ratios, etc) which are ways of measuring social development and environmental quality and sustainability, they will be creating something which can rival orthodox ways of measuring ‘progress’, such as growth in GNP.” This erstwhile academic debate has now become the accepted wisdom.
Jean Nouvel, recent winner of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal, notes that on “the other side of the glorification of Western ‘progress’ … it is possible to use local resources (wind, sun, ocean) before it is attempted … to offer development help with exorbitantly expensive infrastructure systems of Western buildings and ways of thinking.” Nouvel’s comments represent more than the simple fact that it is cheaper to build with local materials; he offers under-development as a lifestyle opportunity.
Nowadays, the noble savages’ “dynamic attitude to shelter” and their admirable ability to deal without the fripperies of modern life, never fails to impress the Western chattering classes who seem increasingly to believe themselves to be worse off - corrupted by their own materialism.
Such is the current level of self-doubt in the West, that architects, traditionally renowned for making bold statements, are now marketing themselves on how small an impact they can make on the world.
Aros Architects, currently building an €80 million hollow statue of Buddha on a 16-hectare site in northern India, to house monastic quarters, offices and ancillary accommodation, etc., opt for the self-sufficiency model. At a height of 152 meters - half as tall again as the Statue of Liberty - the bronze edifice will contain internal spaces of cathedral-like proportions. However, even with such a magnificent feat of engineering, the designers pride themselves on the fact that it will have zero-impact on the environment. Thus, instead of using the opportunity of this mega-project to kick-start a decent infrastructure provision in an undeveloped region of India - potable water will actually be stored in internal aquifers, solar panels will provide electricity to service its own needs, and waste will be treated on-site. Thus anti-social self-sufficiency effectively pulls up the drawbridge on universal provision.
Minimizing one’s impact on the environment has replaced the traditional architectural aspiration to make a maximum impression. Indeed, it comes to something when double Stirling Award-winning architect Chris Wilkinson pontificates that “it is a pity that many of our man-made structures are so heavy and monumental. I prefer the aboriginal concept of treading lightly on the earth.”
Ken Yeang and Bill Dunster similarly laud the environmental credentials of eco-towers for their small footprint. They also admire their high density, natural ventilation, solar panels and CO2-guzzling trees at various storey heights. So convincing is this new breed of high-rise buildings that pride themselves on how small they are (in environmental terms), that even arch-anti-development guru Herbert Girardet hints that skyscrapers are the best way to have minimal impact on the environment.
US architect HOK’s 355,000-square-meter Daewoo Tower design celebrates its so-called minimal impact by using gravel and reed bed waste treatment instead of the new-fangled mains sewage system. Its minimal impact is slightly upset by the fact that its natural waste treatment sterilizes a large portion of the 8-hectare site (which in the old days used to be called ‘pollution’ ). But here we see the logical consequence of sustainable architecture offering a parochial vision of the future. That parochialism - masquerading as a critique of big infrastructure and corporate technology - often manifests itself as making do with less. Lowering our horizons. And the poor of the Third World can definitely show us a thing or two about that.
In my view, architects should stop celebrating - and lauding - the natural environment. Whether that means ‘building big’ is for individual architects and related professions to decide. But at the very least they should start thinking big again - challenging social, infrastructural and environmental constraints rather than accepting them as sacrosanct natural boundaries. As long as architects justify their projects as having nominal impact on the urban or natural environment, even tall buildings will be no challenge to small thinking.

Austin Williams is director of the Future Cities Project and author of Shortcuts: Essential guides for building designers. An architect and project manager by profession, he is also a columnist with the Daily Telegraph and occasional Tutor at the vehicle design department of the Royal College of Art. He was the co-ordinator of the ‘Future of Community’ festival.
Austin has written for a wide range of publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Educational Supplement, Top Gear, New Humanist, Blueprint, Building Design and MJ. He is author of the forthcoming book entitled Enemies of Progress (2008) and is also the originator and organiser of the Bookshop Barnies.

Housing: brownfield brutalism and urbophobia

New Labour is committed to a policy that brutally requires most new homes to be crammed into brownfield land. (1) This is one of the factors that has led it to celebrate what it insists is a ‘revival’ of our inner cities. After all, there are also new shopping centres (most famously, Birmingham’s new Bull Ring, 2003), and cleaned-up waterfronts. There is a broad decline of crime. Most important, there has been a general rise in employment – especially public sector employment: (2)

Growth in UK workforce jobs, thousands

	June 2003	June 2005	June 2006
Distribution, hotels and restaurants	6,991	7,082	7,031
Finance and business services	5,907	6,046	6,168
Education, health and public administration	7,249	7,482	7,943
All jobs	30,213	30,590	31,064

It’s clear that, since the dark era of inner-city riots in the 1980s, metropolitan Britain has chalked up some successes. However, urban strategies today are often out-of-date and betray low expectations: science parks (1960s); business parks (1980s); clusters, tourism, culture, and architectural icons (1990s); ‘knowledge transfer’ links with universities and schemes to encourage entrepreneurs (early 2000s), and now… casinos.

Today many cities in a country such as Germany boast scores of electronics companies and Chinese inward investors. But few middleweight UK cities – Bolton, Exeter, Leicester – think they can achieve these things, even within the next 10 years.

Expectations are bound to be low, because in the UK, more than in many other places, cities and the transport and energy they use are often seen as a Bad Thing. The news of 2006, that the world had reached a point at which the majority of its population now lives in cities, was regarded with apprehension.

As a result, we face a paradox. Government ministers trumpet endless renaissances in urban development, and see our old friend, the city-region, as a key to UK economic growth. At the same time, however, cities have become synonymous, in the mind of Home Secretary John Reid, with hoodies, drugs and anomie.

Even in rural communities – for example, Wales – young people now find houses completely unaffordable. By 2020, the pressures of overcrowding (cities) and affordability (both cities and countryside) will demand radically new solutions.

Will engineering be part of those solutions? That depends on Britain having a government that’s enlightened about the contribution engineering can make to our cities.

In place of ‘placemaking’

Along with low expectations in the urban realm, officialdom continues to embrace spatial determinism – the view that housing design, streetscape, landscape gardening and office design can guarantee prosperity and social cohesion. (3)

This has causality all the wrong way. It is wealth that makes places, nor places that make wealth. Place cannot assure social solidarity. (4) At least NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, nods at the key role played by jobs and infrastructure in urban development. (5) For the rest, however, debate tends to focus not on the benefits of R&D and engineering to cities, but rather on how man-made devices such as the cul-de-sac cause obesity, car dependency and crime.

Prince Charles leads the way in this kind of analysis. (6) Yet what appears to be an attack on a particular kind of street layout is in fact a diatribe against human beings and their talents. While concrete the past mistakes of urban planners are the formal target, the real target is any attempt to fashion the world in the way we want – mistakes, inevitably included.

Engineering can only suffer in such a misanthropic conception. It’s time that engineers and their allies stood up for human beings’ capability to transform the planet. It’s time, too, that they repudiated the narcissistic tinkerings promulgated by self-satisfied architects and designers.

Manufactured homes vs. CO2 emissions

Much is said about climate change; but one simple fact, related to CO2 emissions initiated from houses rather than workplaces or transport systems, is overlooked: manufacturing millions of new, highly insulated homes, with built-in energy technologies and easily replaceable (podularised) kitchens, bathrooms and loos, would make a lot of sense. It would be a means to greater UK energy efficiency much more direct than retro-fitting the UK’s antique housing stock with weak sources of intermittent power.

From another angle, it is clear that David Cameron windmills, Curry’s solar panels and Powergen loft conversions can be no substitute for the macrogeneration of energy. Britain has seen no new power stations built since 2000. In London, Battersea Power Station has lain idle since 1983. If it’s time to seek routes to lower carbon emissions, these should emphasise not a feel-good yet high-maintenance rooftop individualism, but rather a new generation of rational, centralised and efficient power plants – nuclear ones included.

Innovation in transport and IT

The Channel Tunnel Rail Link, due for completion later this year, is the first major new railway line in Britain in more than a century. Yet if we take what could now be done, it’s apparent that mass transit through magnetic levitation has many possibilities. Mag-lev is too important a technology to be left to John Redwood MP to defend, single-handedly!

In Shanghai, China has built a mag-lev link to connect its airport with its financial district. In Germany, by contrast, Greens managed to stop plans for a much longer link – from Berlin to Hamburg.

Britain must decide between these two directions in transport policy. The recent Eddington report on transport concluded, however, that there is little case for new very High Speed Lines (sic). With the usual low expectations, Sir Rod Eddington argued that high-speed rail links are no match for ‘fares pricing, signals-based methods of achieving more capacity on the existing network, and conventional solutions to capacity problems, e.g. longer trains’. (7)

Officialdom gives similarly short shrift to IT’s role in cities. For the Thames Gateway, billed as Europe’s largest housing scheme, IT is almost entirely neglected. (8) Among local authorities, mobile IT is restricted to pilots worth a stunning national total of £4m. (9) Along with the modest efforts made by Bristol City Council, only Manchester City Council, which plans to build the largest (400 square miles) WiFi zone in Europe, can claim to be making much progress in urban IT. (10)

Economic development for world-class cities

More than ever, Britain’s cities are dependent on outside factors for their growth: intrinsic dynamism is lacking. Cities depend on factors such as EU Structural Funds (Liverpool – £1.3bn), students (especially foreign ones), and tourists. In the North, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, they depend still more obviously on Whitehall largesse with public sector funds and jobs.

But there is another way. By investing in engineering and R&D, cities can develop their own impetus. To say that engineering around manufacturing has a future is not nostalgic: if capital simply moved to low-wage countries, as so many ill-informed radicals imagine, Britain would not now be enjoying a reasonable boom in manufacturing output – nor the considerable improvements in manufacturing productivity it has won in the past 30 years, by contrast with its poor record of productivity in services.

Even and especially in services, Britain needs fresh R&D. UK services, particularly financial services, still see little in the way of software innovations. For London, but also for new financial centres such as Edinburgh and Glasgow, software engineering has much to contribute.

In time, UK cities will take engineering’s powers of propulsion seriously. To remain complacent would be to consign a generation of youth to dead-end, low-skills jobs – as well as cramped, energetically inefficient housing.

(1) The dangers of Brownfield Brutalism, James Woudhuysen, spiked, 20 September 2006

(2) National Statistics, Labour market statistics, Table 5(2) Workforce jobs by industry, February 2007

(3) See for example Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, Housing audit: assessing the design quality of new housing in the East Midlands, West Midlands and the South West, 8 February 2007; Transforming our streets, 5 September 2006; Urban parks: do you know what you’re getting for your money?, 13 February 2006; and The impact of office design on business performance, 1 May 2005

(4) Stop this ‘urban regeneration’ roadshow, James Woudhuysen, spiked, 24 November 2005

(5) NESTA, Innovation in UK cities, January 2007. For a commentary, see IT is our best bet for urban renewal, IT Week, 15 February 2007

(6) Robert Booth, ‘Charles: let’s kill off the cul-de-sac’, Sunday Times, 11 February 2007

(7) HM Treasury, The Eddington Transport Study – The case for action: Sir Rod Eddington’s advice to Government, December 2006, Figure 15, p49

(8) Thames Gateway: when IT really matters, May 2006

(9) Andy McCue, Funding holds back public sector mobile working, Silicon.com, 12 October 2006

(10) James Brown, Bristol extends WiFi network, Computing, 5 December 2006, and Brown, Manchester plans largest European Wifi zone, Computing, 5 December 2006

As more of us choose to live in and around urban environments, we continue to turn to the engineering community to help us build taller buildings, faster trains and wider roads.  Some developments are less successful in the long-term than others.

The car-dependent suburban developments found primarily in North America but also common in the UK presented people with an idealistic way of life after World War II.  Today, the engineering of such places can arguably be held at least partially responsible for a number of problems.  Pollution goes up and peoples’ waistlines expand because it’s far easier to drive everywhere.  The lack of shared public spaces and opportunities for community interaction can lead to feelings of isolation and depression.  The limited number of significant opportunities for young people lead to boredom and, in extreme cases, involvement in crime.  The mass-production of cheap homes in low-density areas often does not make positive contributions to architecture in many cities.  Some city centres suffer similar problems.

To be fair, engineers shouldn’t be held to account for these maladies; ultimately we get what we ask for. 

City life will only continue to improve so long as residents demand, through their democratic participation, that planning authorities and the engineering community work together to address those elements of urban and suburban life that are not in the long-term interests of our physical and social health.

Engineering has delivered innovative solutions in many areas of city life that have greatly improved our physical environment.  The challenge for urban engineering in the future will be to find ways to improve our social environment, as well.

Sure technology and speed have their place.  The rate of technological change permits me to work at home and thus spend more time with my family and less time travelling.

But we need to ask the question ‘What is all this speed for?  What is really important?’

Speed for speed’s sake is pointless.  It accomplishes nothing.  Materialism for the sake of ‘just owning something because it’s there, or is better than what you currently have’ seems shallow.  Would you rather buy a new stereo system, or buy a week’s extra vacation and spend it relaxing with your family (I know what I’d choose!)

The things that are really important in life are the things that are worth slowing down for and taking your time over.  Sharing dinner with family and friends; not thinking about work or checking emails when you go home to see your wife/husband who you haven’t seen all day.  Not rushing to get to ‘the next thing’ and instead spending the time to read your child a proper bedtime story.

Life is for experiencing, not for zipping through so fast that you get to the end and it was all a blur.

I have been living slower for a while now.  I feel better, have more patience and time to spend with people and am not any less productive at work!  Where’s the downside in that?

Gary Reynolds, UK

Evolution has always been about advancement in one form or another. 
Different people are likely to express different views about what constitutes advancement based around their particular desires, values and goals.
As long as this is done within a mindset of sustainability and long term thinking there are few problems.  However, I feel we are increasingly losing perspective and shunning our responsibilities in favour of quick results for the privileged few.

Naturally, speed is good.  But what is the cost?  And for whom?  The issues are far wider and deeper than most of us realise.

Lawrence Mohammed, UK

I clicked on this topic [at www.idler.co.uk] because I’ve just made a journey, by narrowboat, from Nottingham to Northampton - at around 4 mph. While on the water I travelled between miles of beautiful deserted countryside, fields and woodland, mostly in solitude.

On the couple of occasions when I had to leave the boat and find a village I was struck by the unpleasantness of attempting to walk country roads, especially in the dark, while being constantly ‘buzzed’ by 4x4s and fast sleek cars on their way to villages that have become little more than dormitories for yuppy commuters.

At one point during the journey, coming close to the M1, I found the roar and mad tumult of the traffic utterly bewildering. What surprised me, after nine days of solitude and the quiet of my own mind was the sheer violence of the spectacle. I found myself aghast that we would choose to live our lives this way, hurling ourselves with such fury from one part of this tiny island to another.

Frank Kelly, UK

We live in a technology driven society that provides us with means to make things faster, easier, more effective, and more productive. We have become so accustomed to engineered solutions to human problems that a world without harbours, bridges, computers and high-speed trains seems almost unrealistic.

Put it differently, technology develops from deep-rooted values, where “fast” has a good reputation and “slow” is considered bad. But today’s high-speed society seems to drive away from itself. It fails to address the most urgent question - that of sustainability.

My question is: how do we make room for a value system that is sensitive to sustainable change?

Tomas Moberg, Sweden

Is there any limit to our pursuit of speed?  Of course there is, it’s c, the speed of light (300, 000 km /s in free space).  But until we reach it, then we should keep exploring ways of going faster. 

Want to spend more time at your destination?  Travel faster.  Want to visit your friends and get home in time to cook a three course meal?  Speed makes it possible.  Being able to do housework more quickly allows us to spend more time doing other things that we enjoy.  And that’s it, speed lets us do more things.  It can reduce the time we spend doing things we don’t want to do, but have to do (travelling to work, cleaning, cooking) and allow us to spend more time doing whatever it is that we want to do.  So with increasing speed, we can improve our ‘work-life’ balance, we can spend more time with our families and friends.  We can achieve more.  It’s our choice to make - to drive or to walk - because sometimes it’s the journey that is the pleasure, not the arrival.  But it’s thanks to engineering that we have that choice at all.

Rachel Cooke, UK

There seems to be some confusion between having the ability to go faster when we want to, and whether going faster is desirable. I think we should always be striving to improve our ability to do all sorts of things, like travelling faster. However, that ability often conflicts with other priorities. For example, it’s nice to get from A to B quickly. But if lots of cars, travelling at relatively high speeds, decide that using my previously quiet road as a ‘rat run’ will improve their travelling time, it’s going to have a negative effect on my quality of life. (Or, more pertinently in my case, if every teenage so-and-so decides that their need for speed necessitates zipping up and down the street on ear-crushingly loud mini motos.)

Ideally, we’d separate people in the business of travelling from people in the business of living. Metro systems do this very well. But we can’t always have that and then we need to make some choices about how we want to live that are a bit more complicated than “speed is good, slow is bad” - or vice versa, for that matter.

Ally Herbert, UK

A lot of the points made by Andrew English and Peter Martin are fair and sensible - but they don’t answer Carl Honore’s basic point, which is that we don’t feel like we’re using speed to improve our lives - we feel like speed is using us, and not leaving us time to stop and think about what direction we’d like to be moving in. That doesn’t make us “anti-technology”. That makes us human beings who suspect that there is more to life than what we’ve got!

Karen Smith, UK

Sitting back with a glass of wine reading Carl Honore’s piece might make me sound like a fan… But really, does “slow medicine” really include reike? I save time by avoiding going to the doctors, especially the ones that waste an hour of my life holding their hands over my sore knee!

I can understand that some businesses using the 35 hour week and extended holiday allowance can reduce stress and increase creativity, but might it not also encourage the staff to stick at the same job for more than the usual three years before moving on? Would this not also give the benefit of a more experienced workforce able to do the same job not only better but faster?

And as for “A British mens magazine recently ran the following headline: Bring Her To Orgasm In 30 Seconds!”. That might have been out of necessity!

Ian Walters, UK

The architect Antonio Sant’Elia understood, in The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture published on 1 August 1914, that Things will endure less than us. That meant: Every generation must build its own city. For the Futurists, most hopeful before the mechanised slaughter of the First World War, it was important to speed up life. To get the most out of being alive - not to be weighed down by the detritus of old places that had served their useful purpose, and needed replacing. Clearly the technophilia of the Futurists was insufficient. Society is more than the pace of technological advance, as vitally important as that is. It is a social dynamic that we require. Nearly a century later, and with a global population of 6.5 billion rising to around nine billion in our lifetime, we can get really busy living. With twenty-first century technical possibilities, we are all building a new world of vast, unprecedented cities, all within our reach and
within reach of our senses. While we need to speed up that process of making a world fit to live in - a humanized nature - those saying slow down expect disasters. None need come if we put our minds to it. This is not the decade before a World War though we should stop causing wars for others. Climate change will bring new opportunities for new development. This is the first decade of the best century there has been, so far. This planet is ours we should do more things with it, and faster. Or our children will wonder why we were so idle when we had so much to do. They will not want to inherent our old, worn out things. 

Ian Abley, audacity.org, UK

Every parent knows that children like bedtime stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. But I used to be too fast, too hectic, too hurried to slow down with Dr. Seuss. Instead, I whizzed through The Cat In The Hat, skipping a line here, a paragraph there, sometimes a whole page. Things got so rushed I even considered buying a book of one-minute bedtime stories. And that’s when the alarm bells started ringing.

Thankfully, I never bought the 60-second fables. Instead, I began investigating the possibility of slowing down in a world addicted to speed. What I discovered is that right across the globe people are finding ways to put on the brakes - without having to ditch their careers and join a commune.

We need a ‘slow’ revolution now more than ever. These days, many of us are stuck in fast forward. We work fast, talk fast, think fast, eat fast, play fast. We even make love in a hurry. A British men’s magazine recently ran the following headline: ‘Bring Her To Orgasm In 30 Seconds!’

Of course, speed is not always bad. It can be fun, liberating, productive. The problem is that many of us have forgotten how to slow down. We are stuck in roadrunner mode, and pay a heavy price for it. We sleep 90 minutes less a night than a century ago. Stress-related illnesses are soaring, costing billions of dollars a year in medical bills and absenteeism. People are burning out younger than ever before. At work, we often do things quickly instead of doing them well. And who has enough time for family and friends? In our haste, we struggle to relax, to take pleasure from things, to enjoy the moment.

What is the cure for this rushaholism? Simple: Slow down a little. Consider the workplace. Working less can mean working better. Often derided as lazy vacation-junkies, the French are actually the world’s most productive workers per hour. Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden all work relatively short hours yet their economies are highly competitive. Even in workaholic Japan the government is now urging companies to give staff more time off.

Leading firms see the writing on the wall. SAS, a US-based software giant, combines a French-style 35-hour work-week with generous vacation benefits. The payoff: robust profits and a regular place in the Top 10 of Fortune’s Best Companies To Work For. Slowing down on the job can pay dividends, too. Research shows that taking regular breaks during the workday makes employees more energetic and creative. Relaxation helps the brain slip into a richer, more nuanced mode of thinking. That is why our best ideas seldom come in the middle of a fast-paced meeting or in the final dash to meet a deadline; they come when we chill out – sun-tanning on the beach, soaking in the bath or eating a sandwich in the park. Psychologists call this ‘slow thinking’.

To get the creative juices flowing, many companies are setting aside quiet places where staff can relax, practice yoga or even take a nap. Corporate Spain is boosting productivity by bringing back the siesta. Google employees get one day a week to work on their own projects without deadlines, targets or schedules. Everywhere, companies are starting to impose speed limits on the information superhighway. Hewlett Packard recently warned that the constant barrage of electronic interruptions causes IQ levels in the workplace to fall 10 points – the equivalent of smoking marijuana. In other words, being “always on” does not turn you into an über-productive master of the universe; it turns you into Ozzy Osbourne.

Veritas, a software-heavyweight in California, has made staff more productive by introducing email-free days. Over at IBM, a senior executive now signs off every email with this rallying cry: “Read your mail just twice each day. Recapture your life’s time and relearn to dream. Join the slow email movement!” And that’s IBM, not an aromatherapy cooperative.

Beyond the workplace, many are taking a slower approach to food, and eating better as a result. Look at the rise of farmers’ markets and cooking classes, or the renaissance of handmade bread, cheese and beer. The Italian-based Slow Food movement, which stands for everything fast food does not, now has 100,000 members in over 50 countries.

Slowing down can also work wonders in the bedroom. We all laughed when Sting raved about romping Tantric-style for hours on end but now couples all over the world are flocking to workshops to learn the art of unhurried love-making. Italy even has a Slow Sex movement. Millions more are tuning their bodies and minds with slower exercise (think yoga, tai chi and SuperSlow weightlifting) and slower forms of medicine (think Reiki, acupuncture and herbalism).

There is also a growing backlash against the trend for over-loading children. Kids need unscheduled free time to recharge, to learn how to think creatively and how to socialize. Cargilfield, a private school in Scotland, has boosted exam results by banning homework for pupils up to the age of 13. The dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology now travels round the US telling parents that children need time to loaf and daydream. In a similar vein, Harvard sends all its first-year undergraduates a letter extolling the virtues of doing less and relaxing more. The title of the letter: “Slow Down.”

Of course, you can take this deceleration thing too far. Slower is not always better. Too much slowness is just as bad as too much speed. What we really need is balance - an understanding that sometimes fast is good, but that sometimes slow is good, too. Getting in touch with my inner tortoise has made me more relaxed, productive and creative. I also feel closer to my friends and family and more able to enjoy each moment of my day.

Bedtime stories are certainly a lot more fun when you don’t speed-read them.

Carl Honoré is an award-winning author and journalist. He has written from all over Europe and South America for the Economist, the Observer, the Miami Herald, and Time magazine. His first book, In Praise of Slow examines the modern compulsion to hurry and chronicles a global trend toward putting on the brakes. Published in 26 languages, it is a best-seller around the world and has been hailed as a manual for leading a richer life by publications ranging from Yoga Journal, Resurgence and Spirituality and Health to the Economist, Management Today and Business World. Honoré lives in London with his wife and two young children. He is now writing a book about childhood.

Thomas Bray never built a better fire than he did on Sunday July 3 1938. From the edge of the firebox, the finest Welsh steam coal glowed bright orange, spreading inwards to the incandescent centre. Joseph Duddington knew his fireman had given him the tools for the job when he opened the regulator and engine No 4468, the A4 LNER Pacific class locomotive known as Mallard surged past Grantham towards the gently sloping Stoke Bank on the East Coast main line.

Speed record breaking in trains is a curious affair and to gain the world record, which still stands today, Nigel Gresley’s 165-ton design was required neither to run on a flat surface, nor reverse its direction so that average of the two runs could be taken. All Duddington had to do was to coax as much speed out of the world’s most advanced steam engine as he could. With its four exhaust nozzles flowing through its Kylchap extractor stack and its Gresley-Holcroft motion shaft whirring, Mallard huffed like machine possessed; at its rear a dynamometer car finally recorded 126mph over a 440-yard stretch and the record was taken.

Speed was the jazz in the 1930s. In America, the Bonneville Salt flats were road-blocked with the mighty internal-combustion-powered machines of John Cobb, George Eyston and Malcolm Campbell, all vying for the world land-speed record. The world’s lakes were similarly filled with huge-engined devices such as Sir Henry Segrave’s Miss England, while in the air the astounding Schneider Trophy races for seaplanes saw the development of the all-conquering Supermarine seaplane, the precursor to Reginald Mitchell’s Spitfire.

The search for speed represented technical advancement, bravery and glamour. Modern fuels, lubricants, seals, tyres and structures were being developed and aerodynamics were beginning to be better understood - the Mallard and Spitfire perfectly illustrated huge advances in the design of wind-cheating shapes. On the high seas, warship designers had started to understand the hydrodynamic forces acting on their designs, giving us fast and manoeuvrable hull shapes for motor torpedo boats and, on a much larger scale, the gargantuan Iowa class battleships, capable of 34 knots and astonishing firepower with a beam narrow enough to slip through the Panama canal.

As Stephen King-Hall wrote in the 1937 Batsford Book Of Speed: “Floating in the foreground of this tricky subject, changing its shape, eluding one’s grasp as if it were an Invisible man, is the Time/Space factor. It is a four-dimensional affair. There is Time and there is Space, with its three dimensions of length, breadth and depth. Though man is confined within the boundaries of this affair, he does not live passively within his prison, he is always at work changing its shape.”

Of course, with hindsight we can see that part of this 1930s technical build up was an arms race towards the Second World War, but it was a race that laid down the foundations of the modern appliances we take for granted today, such as the motor car and the jet airliner. It was an age of restless impatience and insatiable curiosity; if you add the catalysts of money and public interest, you’ve got the elixir of technical progress.

As King-Hall explained: “Man has a working life of perhaps 35 years, containing 12,783 days, two thirds of which are taken up with eating, sleeping, attending to the body and travelling, so we are left with 4,261 days. What a beggarly allowance! No wonder we are always anxious to save time.”

Speed allowed man to cheat the limitations of time (and his inevitable death) and the devices of that era allowed us to cheat more effectively than we had ever done before. In the 20th century man stepped onto a rollercoaster of development that has since travelled ever faster and shows little sign of slowing.

How often do you hear the phrase, “money rich, time poor”? In this new century we need to expand space into time more than ever, yet instead of clear-sighted debate about using speed to enhance our lives, the developed world has perverted its meaning. Newspapers and broadcast media engage in bad-tempered and ignorant squabbles that supplant rational debate with self-aggrandising pseudo-science. They shake speed in your face like a voodoo doll. Poor old speed, once the acme of efficiency, gets a bad rap.

What does speed mean today? The needless combustion of fossil fuels? Suicidally cheap airlines and dangerously fast cars? Draconian enforcement of traffic laws? Or is it an insidious tyrant, enslaving us within a blizzard of information, business travel and communication? The truth is that shunning speed is disingenuous, dangerous and sometimes downright patronising. Few but the very rich have the luxury of living slowly; speed is necessary to run our lives, as essential as air or food.

The Italian ‘Slow Food’ movement, for example, has been taken up like a mantra by the pampered wealthy who owe their livings and freedom of travel to speedy devices and the exploitation of others’ time. ‘The ‘Slow food’ restaurants I have visited have been filled with an eisteddfod of dilettantes fondly imagining they are living through an Italian rural idyll, while those who work have to eat down the road where the food is seldom less delicious or cooked with less love.

In fact ‘Slow Food’ has nothing to do with speed; it’s about the environment, respect for producers and cooking with proper ingredients, and you can choose to do that quickly or slowly. Similarly, any speed debate in the UK is usually about something else, such as road safety, personal responsibility, research budgets, the environment, global warming or, perhaps most dangerous of all, prurient finger pointing.

In the past few months I’ve read articles about new particle accelerators, fusion reactors, the exploration of Mars and a development that joins cars together via WireFi at 90mph to increase the throughput of motorways. All these developments involve an engineering understanding of speed, yet the reports have been little more than grumpy dissections of the ideas on environmental, cost, or safety grounds.

Perhaps it’s a British engineering dyslexia that underlies our current attitude; those 1930s speed kings and queens might have been overly impressed by speed, but at least they were simultaneously thrilled by the science and engineering involved. Or perhaps it’s about the way we look at the future. In the 1930s people were optimistic and wanted to get to the future faster. In a pessimistic and fearful new century, going slow is our way of avoiding tomorrow.

Andrew English is the staff motoring correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and is only just the right side of 50. He is a member of the European Car of The Year Jury, has been the Guild of Motoring Writers’ feature writer of the year three times and Journalist of the Year just once. He is married with two children, a venerable and pampered Labrador, a venerable and pampered Aston Martin and lives on the Surrey/Sussex borders.

‘Sink into total comfort with a soft under-mattress, cosy duvet and plump pillow, all covered in the finest 100% Egyptian cotton.’ ‘Enjoy a delicious… meal in the Clubhouse and… have a warming nightcap, slip into your sleepsuit and drift off to sleep.’ Sounds like the ideal hotel? Actually, you get to lay your head on Egyptian cotton flying first class with British Airways and get zipped into your sleepsuit (a what?) if you are lucky enough to travel Virgin Upper Class.

A tangible memory of your favourite airline fulfils another marketing maxim, so Virgin will give Upper Class customers an amenity kit designed by celebrity tailor Ozwald Boateng. Not to be outdone, handbag snobs’ favourite, Anya Hindmarch designed British Airway’s washbag, which will match the complimentary ‘luxury velvet slippers’. For years now airlines have competed to lure wealthy passengers using ever more elaborate and image conscious tricks to win their loyalty.

Yet, despite these efforts of one-upmanship, the one thing that you cannot buy is speed. No one can get you across the Atlantic faster than anyone else: period. In fact, since British Airways and Air France mothballed Concorde in 2003, it actually takes longer to fly across the pond than it did back in 1976, when commercial supersonic services began.

Where once Phil Collins could famously (or maybe infamously) jet across from Wembley to Philadelphia to play Live Aid concerts in two continents on the same day, today international celebrities and globe trotting executives can only differentiate themselves from economy travellers with luxury airline freebies.

Concorde’s first commercial flight took place on 21 January 1976, when British Airways flew from London Heathrow to Bahrain, and Air France from Paris to Rio. So began the transport vision inspired and financed, at least in part, by Harold Wilson’s 1963 declaration of the ‘White Heat of Technology’.

Fast-forward to 2003, and the passing of Concorde prompted headline news and much misty- eyed nostalgia from frequent flyers and the public alike (1). Understandable maybe; but think about it - other than classic car collectors, how many people aspire to drive a car made in 1976? How many people still listen to music on a stereo built when Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody was Number 1?

In technological terms Concorde was way ahead of the pack. As the Financial Times reminded us on the announcement of Concorde’s pending retirement: ‘Concorde has set technical standards that have never been matched.’ (2) But this, surely, was the problem. Whilst many mourned the end of Concorde, the fact that nothing was built to match it, let alone surpass it, is a rather depressing sign of the times. The most technically advanced and fastest aircraft was mothballed, not because it was superseded by anything better but because we simply gave up the idea of faster air travel.

Today, at least for commercial travel, we’re unable to fly to a destination faster than Concorde’s first flight, over a quarter of a century ago.

Concorde was an example of the ambition we once had for air travel. The speed and luxury of Concorde offered a glimpse of how we would like travel to be. Sadly only available for the few, yet a worthy ambition nonetheless. Today, all that ambition, it seems, is history.

Commitment to supersonic travel was a fitting sign of the optimism of the late 1960s. Today, in contrast, the importance placed on in-flight massages and manicures or designer goody-bags is scant consolation for the lack of fast international travel and a widespread pessimism towards speed.

Peter Smith lectures in tourism and tourism management at St. Mary’s University College, Twickenham.

(1) End of an era for Concorde, BBC News, October 24 2003

(2) BA and Air France to Ground Concorde, Financial Times, April 10 2003

According to Wash & Go’s marketing people, their product “gives great looking hair without the fuss so you can get on with the more important things in life”.

Meaning we are all too busy to actually cope with not only a shampoo but a conditioner too. Thank goodness Wash & Go has come to the rescue, allowing us to focus on all those “more important things in life”.

These marketers don’t actually define what these events are, but watching TV may well be one of them. The average Brit, after all, still spends two and a half hours a day in front of the box (according to a recent survey conducted for Google), so it must be something that’s very important to us.

Hair care is not the only task that has become quicker in recent years. A myriad of brand owners are bending over backwards to make their products more convenient for all those busy, busy people out there.

Household cleaning products are now stuffed with such a cocktail of toxins that you only have to open the lid and evil grime and germs wither away. What a change from the bad old days, when cleaning a house took a bit of effort and (worse still) time.

The food manufacturers tap into this need for speed very effectively with their chiller cabinet fayre. Frozen is no longer good enough for us, with all that defrosting time. Much better is the chilled ‘meal solutions’ that can be zapped by the microwave in less time than it takes to recover the TV remote from the back of the sofa.

And of course no self-respecting go-getter has time for breakfast. Hence the arrival of that efficacious invention, the breakfast bar. Looking back, it beggars belief that people wasted precious minutes amassing a bowl, spoon, milk and cereal, and then most probably sat at a table to consume. Mind you, those were the days when people still had dining tables – an old-fashioned item which is rapidly become scarce in UK households.

There are whole sections in bookshops now on the joys of scratch cooking, in a desperate effort to wean people off pre-prepared, convenience fodder. But it’s only the farmers’ market-frequenting types who are taken in by this wheeze. Nobody else has the time.

In fact the supermarkets have discovered that we don’t even have time for the simplest of culinary activities, even if we do dare to stray from the chilled zone.

Who’d have thought that someone who wants to ‘scratch cook’ may be seduced by pre-sliced mushrooms. Apparently there is no contradiction in this, and such sealed punnets are skipping off the supermarket shelves at more than double the price of their whole, ‘slow food’ alternatives. Luckily we still have time to actually unwrap the increasing layers of packaging.

Even when the media does encourage us to eat properly, we still need to have our foot on the accelerator. That daytime TV staple Ready, Steady Cook challenges chefs to conjure up two or three courses in just 15 minutes.

Having said that, maybe 15 minutes is actually unrealistically ponderous. After all, it’s predicted that by 2010 the average time taken to prepare a meal will be down to just eight minutes. Compare that with 1961, when the average woman spent around 1 hour, 40 minutes a day cooking (according to Akhtar and Humphries, The Fifties & Sixties – A Lifestyle Revolution).

And for all those over-eaters out there, fear not. Even losing weight can happen swiftly. One brand, Slimfast, says it all.

But it’s not just nutrition which is being peddled to us on the basis of its time-saving attributes. Health is another treasure trove. Because we no longer have time to be ill – though of course that does allow us to maintain our TV quota.

So illness has now been repackaged as something to be overcome as quickly as possible. There are cold and flu remedies out there that helpfully remind the poorly that the sooner they get back to the office, the less chance their colleagues have of nicking their job. A valid point, surely. Perhaps such remedies should be rebranded ‘health solutions’ à la ‘meal solutions’.

The only people who admit to slowing the pace of life rather than speeding it up are the purveyors of anti-ageing products. If they can’t yet stop the dermatological clock, then at least they promise to slow its progress. That’s if we’ve got time to actually apply the stuff.

Clare Dowdy is a writer on branding and design for a number of publications including Wallpaper* and the Financial Times.

Twenty years ago, McDonalds decided to open a branch, in Piazza di Spagna in Rome. For some people, it was an affront. Italy, which prides itself on having one of the world’s great cuisines, was allowing cheap, poor quality fast food right into its historic heart.

One of those affronted people was Carlo Petrini, an Italian food and wine journalist. As a direct contrast to the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am ethos of fast food, he created the Slow Food movement. The aim wasn’t necessarily to stop the spread of McDonalds etc but to promote the idea that there was something better available and to preserve food traditions and products that might otherwise die out.

You can see how a simple idea like this can take on a life of its own. In 1989, a Slow Food manifesto was agreed. It begins:

‘Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods. To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.’

In a nutshell, Slow Food is a reaction to modern life. There is much about modern life that is worth reacting against. Before I lived in London, I used to be struck by the faces of the people on the Tube. I always thought they looked a bit miserable. When you’ve had another unsatisfying burger, eaten on the run because you’re too busy and too hungry to wait, and you’ve got too much to do at work, there’s every reason to feel like life is out of your control. You long to stop and smell the roses. Fast food society kinda sucks.

Slow food promises a completely different experience. Rather than the same tasteless, mass-produced rubbish, we are invited to develop our taste buds by sampling the huge range of foods available from around the world. Cheese, bread, wine, fresh vegetables, meat that has had time to graze and mature, all sorts of different things. Even in England, famously described as having sixty religions and only one sauce, regional foods are being rediscovered or have become fashionable again.

But it’s not just the foodstuffs themselves that are celebrated. The whole process domestically from buying the food, to preparing it yourself in new and varied ways, to eating it slowly with friends accompanied by lashings of alcohol is the ideal. For many people, this is idyllic, the exact opposite of the fast food society. This is about spending our time in pursuit of pleasure.

There is a geeky side to this. Reading extracts from the movement’s magazine, Slow, you get the feeling that the writers are the anoraks of food. Who else frets about getting genuine balsamic vinegar from Modena, or knows the differences between pickles and chutneys? In some ways, this is just a more flavoursome version of trainspotting. Entrée-spotting, perhaps.

One other positive I would draw from Slow Food has been its insistence on pleasure over precaution. Many traditional food producers around the world are coming up against excessive hygiene regulations. For example, many cheeses are produced using unpasteurised milk. The European Union has suggested that these kinds of foods should be restricted from general sale - effectively wiping out producers. Slow Food has been at the forefront of defending the right to produce food in ways we don’t fit in with this modern and sterile mindset.

So, what’s wrong with all that? Not a lot, except that I think there’s a danger that in picking on some symptoms of fast food society, we might be misunderstanding the true nature of our problems and, even worse, rejecting the things that make the present day, in many ways, the best of times to live in.

The hedonism of slowness comes at a particular moment in history where there has been a more general rejection, not just of modern society but of the very notion that human beings can be a power for good. This rejection was summed up by the late Tony Banks, MP. In a Commons motion - actually about the use of pigeons in warfare - he said ‘This House believes… that humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and looks forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out thus giving nature the opportunity to start again.’ He was a vegetarian. Can you tell?

Or take the ideas of James Lovelock, once regarded by many as a crank for his Gaia hypothesis but now treated as a serious scientist: ‘Humans on Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic organism, or like the cells of a tumour or neoplasm. We have grown in numbers and disturbance to Gaia, to the point where our presence is perceptibly disturbing… the human species is now so numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady. Gaia is suffering from Disseminated Primatemaia, a plague of people.’

Most people do not want to see human beings wiped from the face of the planet, nor do they believe that the planet is going to extract some kind of revenge on us. But the idea that we need to reduce our ‘footprints’, or that a disaster caused by human-induced global warming is imminent, is now absolutely commonplace.

In this context, the Slow Food manifesto starts to take on a more malevolent tone. While the manifesto starts out as an attempt to snatch our lives back from the jaws of the machine, it ends up describing the multitude as either in the grip of some kind of contagion - in other words, as fools - or perhaps as the contagion itself.

What is so terrible about our modern society? We live longer now than at any time in history. Advances in medicine have pretty much eliminated infectious disease from Western society. Long-term conditions that would once have been a death sentence, like diabetes, can be effectively managed if not yet cured. On many different measures, from education to communication, we have never had it so good.

Even the humble burger provides us with another example: freedom from hunger. We have more food, in