Transcription
[Music] I'm by the river Thames in London. Now, it's a charming place where tourists love to come. But why do they love coming here? Well, you've got views of iconic buildings like the Houses of Parliament and St. Paul's Cathedral. But that's not all. Have a look at this. It's a typical modern lamppost. Do you like it?
>> Well, it does its job, but not much else. But look over here at another lamppost. It does its job and a little bit more. It's details like these that help make this such a charming place to be. But these two lampposts don't just look different. They represent fundamentally different worldviews. If you want to understand any society, don't listen to what it says about itself. Look at what it creates.
[Music] London's little lanes are charming now, but 150 years ago, in places like this, you'd have had whole families crammed into these tiny rooms without running water. There would have been open sewers spilling down the streets, and the stench of sewage boiling in the midday sun would have been unbearable. The whole city stank. It wasn't only horrible to live in, but genuinely dangerous. See, at that point, London had a problem. It was the world's biggest city. Its population was growing every year, along with the construction of new factories and mills and dockyards. All those people and all that industry produced a lot of waste. It had to go somewhere. Where did it go? Into the Thames.
[Music] Something had to be done, and it was an engineer called Joseph Bazalgette who stepped in to construct London's new sewer network in the 19th century. Sewers which still carry London's waste today, rushing beneath me at this very moment. And he also constructed this embankment that I'm standing on to replace what was essentially a stinking swamp filled with rubbish and human waste and eels. It's impossible to calculate how many lives he saved, how many millions of lives he improved. And he's commemorated here at a memorial that no one ever stops to look at.
[Music] When Bazalgette's embankment was completed in 1870, it needed lighting, of course, and so a public competition was held to design the lamps that would line this new promenade. This was the winning design, featuring these peculiar creatures. It's a little much, perhaps, but what's clear is that the Victorians took great pride in their embankment and thought it needed appropriately grand and dramatic decoration. See, these lamps were among the first public electric lighting in the world. This was a radical, revolutionary new technology. Crowds literally gathered to watch them be lit up for the first time. What the iPhone was in 2007, these lamps were in 1870. But looking at it now, you wouldn't know that.
[Music] Those [Music] lampposts don't look modern to us now. They look quaint and old-fashioned. Why? Because they are decorated. And we don't associate decoration with cutting-edge technology. And that's a major difference between us and the Victorians in the 19th century. They saw no contradiction between style and modernity and a touch of tradition. Just like this building, the legendary Houses of Parliament. It was brand new once, but even then, it had been designed in an old and medieval style of architecture. Every technology becomes obsolete and outdated. But a good aesthetic, even if fashions change, can never become obsolete. It is definitionally timeless. Those lamps on the embankment did their job. And even though more efficient and better methods of lighting have been invented, they remain 150 years later. That's the power of good design. And it applies to lampposts no less than to national parliaments.
[Music] And so here in the Houses of Parliament, everything we've been talking about comes together at last. Except that this is not the Houses of Parliament. It's an old sewage facility, a pumping station built in the 19th century as part of Bazalgette's new sewer system. Strange to think that this is infrastructure, a purely functional building with the sole purpose of managing human waste. And yet, it has been designed with the same ornamental exuberance as any church or palace. Why? Well, people worked here. And why shouldn't people who work in sewers also have a beautiful place of work? That is how the Victorians thought. But there's more. There was also a sense of pride, a belief that what they'd done here was worthwhile, that it meant something. And the result, over a century later, is that this place, a sewage facility, is now a museum, a tourist destination. If you want to know what any society really believes in, just look at how they design their sewers.
[Music] Just a few steps from the old 19th-century Victorian pumping station, which has now been decommissioned, is the one built to replace it. It's not bad, I suppose, but it was very clearly not built by the same society, or at least not by a society with the same views about architecture and design. Will this, like the original, be turned into a museum? Maybe. In any case, I imagine that it is more functional, and that it was more convenient to build and to design. Convenient. Now, that's an important word.
[Music] >> Look at this air conditioning unit. I think it says more about the modern world than anything else, more than phones or social media. It's a miraculous technology, one that has changed the world and improved billions of lives. Hence, we stick them literally everywhere. But it's ugly. Ugly because it doesn't seem to express any belief in the idea that ordinary things can also be beautiful. But worse than ugly, it's boring. Now, it would certainly be a bit more expensive to make it prettier, taking a little time and care and attention. But these days, it seems that we would rather make more money to make things look pretty. And maybe that's okay.
[Music] So you can see, I hope, that through something as simple as those lampposts, you can understand the Victorians in their entirety. They didn't have to make it look like that, but they did. Now, you might not think it's beautiful, but I don't think it was supposed to be beautiful. It was just supposed to be pretty, at least interesting, at least not boring. And that in itself says an awful lot. Walking around a city, any city, and looking at its buildings and its infrastructure, you're not just looking at objects. You're looking at religions and principles, beliefs, and ideas. These buildings, they don't just look different. They represent fundamentally different worldviews. Clashing ideas about how we should all think, live, and behave. And those skyscrapers say the same thing as our air conditioning units and sewage plants. That we have become a society of convenience above all else. But there's something else that we haven't mentioned about these lampposts. It would be easy to believe that they were made by artists, and that we somehow wouldn't be able to or couldn't afford to make them anymore. But just like our modern lampposts, our air conditioning units, our everything, these were also mass-produced, made in a factory. We could still mass-produce lamps just like these if we wanted to. We could make our offices and our warehouses look like Crossness Pumping Station. We could make anything we want. That's the ultimate truth, the hardest one to accept. But we don't. We have other priorities. And that's fine. But it's vital we accept that there is another way.
[Music] Modern design tells the truth very loudly that we are technologically superior and very efficient, but also a little bit boring and unimaginative. And it says that we no longer believe in the idea of ordinary beauty or in the idea of a public that deserves ordinary beauty.
[Music] Museums and galleries are wonderful places where we can come and look at things that people used to make and admire their handiwork. They're not just dead historical artifacts. These are living echoes of different ideas about what the world is and what the world could be. But in the end, you can't live in a museum. Now, why things have changed is a significant question, but that's for another time. For now, what's important is to realize that things clearly have changed, and that we've learned this just by looking at all the ordinary objects around us. Now, this isn't about past versus present. It's about learning from the past in order to improve the present. And what the Victorians can teach us is that even ordinary, useful things can also be beautiful. Down the down the down the down the down the down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down the down.
[Music] I'm on a right track to nowhere. Telling me to take my time. I'm on an airplane to anywhere. Just waiting for my chance to jump. I got to make a get away.
[Music] Got to let them know I never stay. Never stay. Got to be.
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