Culture and the spirit of community erection

Knights of the Realm have jousted in my mind on the subject of manufacturing this week. At the ERA Foundation lecture on Wednesay Sir Alan Rudge gave a rousing speech about the renaissance of a UK productive industry. "Britain has been deluded in believing that it leads the way into a post-industrial society", he said. "The illusion that financial services can compensate for the massive imbalance of trade created by our decline in manufacturing has been removed by the collapse of the global financial system". Removed. I like that. Finally, and with feeling: "An industrial renaissance is achievable".

Knights of the Realm have jousted in my mind on the subject of manufacturing this week. At the ERA Foundation lecture on Wednesay Sir Alan Rudge gave a rousing speech about the renaissance of a UK productive industry. "Britain has been deluded in believing that it leads the way into a post-industrial society", he said. "The illusion that financial services can compensate for the massive imbalance of trade created by our decline in manufacturing has been removed by the collapse of the global financial system". Removed. I like that. Finally, and with feeling: "An industrial renaissance is achievable".

My wise and thoughtful interlocutors at lunch, Millie Banerjee of Ofcom and David Bott of the Technology Strategy Board, bemoaned the cultural prejudices against science - and by extension, engineering and industrial manufacturing technology - that deter young people from considering science as an academic option and career. Perception has it that there's less freedom in science than in the arts and humanities; less metaphorical expansiveness; less sociability.

Don't these alleged perceptions make us all sound shallow and merely discursive? I personally confess to nailing it, so easily persuaded as a young teenager by my mother's declaration that I was, like her, an "arts person". Although spurred by a keen crush on my chemistry teacher I had recently scored 95% in the exam, I found this idea that I was an "arts person" instantly alluring. Perhaps it was the notion of being any kind of a "person"; perhaps it doesn't occur to scientists to profile themselves in this way. Anyway that was the end of my science education, apart from a biology O-level that, being essentially narrative, doesn't seem to count.

I asked them if they agreed that the diminishment in our general capacity to make or repair contributed to this cultural prejudice. In our predilection to consume, the less we make; the less we can or want to make. They agreed pretty wholeheartedly. Furthermore I wonder if science simply offers less to consume; fewer mental or material objects ready-made, in a language we understand.

But all the same I left with quite strong hope that culture could change, and inclined to believe Sir Alan, given the mess we're in. But the following morning Sir John Sorrell launched the London Design Festival 2009 to the press with the thought that creativity is the strength to which Britain must play, in the unequivocal absence of financial services or manufacturing. Gonners, apparently, at least for the forseeable future.

Ben Evans introduced the Festival programme as featuring "a different kind of project this year; perhaps less about money and more about the quality of ideas and thought". Woops. Was't not ever thus? Fortunately Henrietta Thompson quickly distracted us with the glorious High Wycombe tradition of the commemorative "chair arch" which is to be recreated as a Wallpaper* project by a mystery European designer in South Kensington in September. Churlish and un-festive of me perhaps to doubt that the post-modern version will bear much trace if the original's spirit of community erection.