Long-distance train travel has its compensations – such as when a chance conversation with a stranger delivers a sudden insight.
One Friday in the autumn of 2007, I sat down beside a heavy-set young guy in a plaid shirt with a carry-out in front of him – he had clearly just come off the rigs on a Bristow chopper – and opposite was an old chap with slicked-back wavy hair and a face creased with laughter lines. Looked like he'd been a Rocker in his day, and when offshore guy went to the toilet, the old chap offered me one of the beers – "He'll never notice..."
We got talking, and I discovered that before he retired he had been a rep for Morgan Crucible, selling fire protection to the construction and offshore industries. Before the advent of intumescent paint, Morgan Crucible, just like TAC (Turners Asbestos), was one of the main suppliers of fireproof boards, blankets and fibrous material which was sprayed onto steelwork to insulate it from high temperatures. Now they concentrate on high-tech fire protection for ships, chemical plants and so forth.
Since retiring, he has delivered cars in order to make a bit of beer money, and today he was returning to Worcester after dropping off a Saab in Forres. So the conversation moved from buildings to cars, and he got around to the fact that he once worked for "a little company in Coventry called Standard-Triumph". I replied that the Stag was surely the best car Triumph ever produced, and he confided that after British Leyland took over Triumph, they quickly moved to close the Research & Development department. 
Triumph Stag Mk2
After that happened, twelve of the men who designed and developed the Stag left Britain to join "a little company in Munich called the Bavarian Motor Works", and shortly afterwards BMW developed their first modern, unified range of compact sporting saloons and coupes, like the predecessors of the modern 3 and 5 series. Until then, BMW’s range consisted of the “Neue Klasse” small saloons and coupes of the late 1960’s and 1970’s, most memorable of which was the 2002. All of them were designed by Michelotti … who also designed the Stag.
Two little lightbulbs came on at that point. Firstly, that confirms what I've always believed about the styling of 1980's and 1990's BMW's. They look too much like Triumphs for the resemblance to be coincidental: for example, the lights and grille are contained in a narrow horizontal frame between bonnet and bumper; a pair of circular headlamps bracketed by arrowhead shaped light clusters which form the edge of the wing; a grille with blacked-out ribs, and a central bay which advances. Then there’s the characteristic "C" pillar applied to each model in the range, and a fascia which curves around the driver.
The BMW 1602 is a German version of the Triumph Herald; the original 5-Series harks back to the Triumph 2000/ 2500 family which was code-named “Innsbruck”. Perhaps this affinity helps to explain why the Bavarians bought Rover from British Aerospace in 1994 … and by all accounts when BMW broke up and sold off Rover years later, they kept the Triumph brand with the Spitfire, Stag and Dolomite names. From time to time there’s speculation about a Triumph revival, but rumour has it that potential claims from former Triumph dealers in the US helped kill that idea off.
BMW 5-series
The second, deeper insight is that when you cut off the head, the organism dies. BL quickly destroyed Triumph's ability to develop cars, otherwise they would have continued to bring products forward and would have retained their own identity. It's all about intellectual property, and the Germans understood that: this is also relevant to architects and designers, since so much of what we do falls into the realm of research and development.
The point my companion made was that Triumph’s fate symbolises what had gone wrong with Britain. Our purchases unwittingly trace the forces which have changed our lives – the decline of manufacturing, the rise of the service econony, the reduced tax take as a result, the shrinking public sector. In fact, it could be said that nowadays only the richest and the poorest actually own things made in this country. The rich because luxury goods are still made here – cashmere scarfs, sports cars, fine china. The poor because they still own older things made before mass production ended in Britain.
Assuming you were born a while before 1980, the car on the driveway was a Triumph or Austin. The radio had a “Bush” badge. The cooker was a New World. The fridge was branded Astral, and the television was bought from the Clydesdale shop (remember them?) on the local High Street. It may have been a 20-inch Ferguson Colourstar, with a veneered chipboard case, six channel buttons on the front, and a coaxial socket on the back but until 1982, when you were at primary school – it only received three channels. 
Triumph Herald Vitesse
Back in the day, Ferguson was owned by Jules Thorn rather than Thomson of France, and made TV sets in a giant factory on the Great North Road as you headed out of Edmonton in London’s scruffy suburbs towards the Watford Gap and Scotland. Now that Ferguson have effectively gone, along with Dynatron, Mullard, Baird and other firms whose names go back to the roots of the TV industry in the 1930’s, only the poorest or the canniest, still have British televisions.
You see this phenomenon at work when rubbish is set down at the kerbside for the scaffies to uplift – the white goods are Kelvinator, Creda, English Electric, but what replaced them is Far Eastern. The new flat screen TV’s are on an even shorter cycle of obsolescence – and with the gradual closure of the brickmaking, steelmaking and ceramics industries in this country, soon we won’t have buildings made here, either.
That isn’t sustainable, so we need to understand construction fits into a greater economic system: I'll illustrate my point using the specification of building materials. There are two different ways to look at building materials – the conventional way, to use Isaiah Berlin's well-worn analogy, is to be a fox, knowing lots of different things about a range of materials. The other way is to concentrate on a Big Idea, perhaps to the exclusion of all else. This is what the hedgehog does.
Berlin expands on this notion by dividing thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, and foxes, who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and for whom the world cannot be boiled down into one all-encompassing system.
BMW 2002
Once, when we used a limited palette of traditional craft materials – stone, brick, lead, copper, timber – every architect had a good grasp of each one. He was a fox. When the systems approach burgeoned after World War Two – curtain walling, single ply roofing, cassette cladding – hundreds of new techniques and materials emerged, and it became difficult to know about every one of them. We retreated from being foxes, and when the Green movement turned mainstream in the 1990's, it enabled some architects to metamorphose completely into hedgehogs.
Their big idea is to build sustainability, and in order to do so they have to learn a great deal about breathability, material toxicity, building biology, and so on, because there are many different ways to measure sustainability. It isn't enough to look at the embodied energy of manufacture, or ease of reuse and recycling, or carbon footprint, exclusively. As transportation costs rise, we need to consider where the product comes from just as much as what it's made from and how it performs in use.
Perhaps we need to re-appraise our specifications, looking at materials which we can source locally. We need to become more like foxes, less like hedgehogs. Of course in order to specify locally-made products we need local factories, and if they're to last, they need to have R&D functions in Scotland. Alternatively, inward investment from Japan, Korea or America uses Scotland as an assembly facility with profits repatriated, but no high level work or headquarters functions here.
The British Disease is short-termism. It's easy to close a factory which is unprofitable in the short term, especially if it lies far away from the heart of the company, whether that’s London or overseas. A good example is the failure of Silicon Glen – several of the large silicon wafer fabrication plants like Motorola, computer assembly plants like IBM and NCR, and high end R&D firms like Calluna or going even further back, Elliott Automation, have gone.
In building component manufacturing, there’s long been a “branch office” culture and for every McAlpine Plumbing, Barrhead Sanitary and Errol Brick which was owned in Scotland, there’s a Vencil Resin or Yorkshire Imperial Metals which had a Scottish branch that succumbed to “market forces.”
The Scottish Cure is to build up our own companies, so that we can source Scottish products, and guarantee a regular supply of jobs, too. With that in mind, in the autumn of 2007 just after I met the effusive chap ex-Morgan Crucible and ex-Standard Triumph, I set out to "build" using only materials and products from Scotland. Then I extended this to plant and machinery made here. It's the type of enterprise which the Victorians willingly took on – a demonstration project – and the results were printed in Urban Realm’s predecessor, Prospect. I wonder how many of these are still in business?
Briggs Roofing, Dundee – roofing membranes and dampcourse
Lareine Engineering, Bathgate – rooflights
James Jones & Sons, Forres – engineered timber joists and beams
Caberboard, Cowie – OSB, chipboard
Godfreys of Dundee – geotextiles
Visqueen, Greenock – vapour barriers
Superglass Insulation, Stirling – insulation
Don & Low, Forfar – Daltex breather membranes
Blairs of Scotland, Greenock – timber external windows and doors
McTavish Ramsay, Dundee – timber internal doors
Aable, Glasgow – metal roller shutters
Chris Craft, Brechin – window blinds
Glasgow Steel Nail Co., Glasgow – nails and fasteners
McConnell Timber Products, Thornhill – timber cladding boards
Fyfestone, Kemnay – architectural masonry
Errol Brick, Perthshire – fired and unfired clay bricks
Laird Brothers, Forfar – thermal blockwork
Leith's Precast, Montrose – precast concrete stairs
Blue Circle Group, Dunbar – cement
J & D Wilkie, Kirriemuir – flooring underlays and fabrics
Forbo-Nairn, Kirkcaldy – linoleum
BMK Stoddard Templeton, Kilmarnock – carpets
Bute Fabrics, Rothesay – upholstery fabrics
Andrew Muirhead, Glasgow – upholstery leather
Dovecote Studios, Edinburgh – tapestries
Ferguson & Menzies, Glasgow – sealers and coatings
Craig & Rose, Dunfermline – paints and varnishes
Aquafire Systems, Newhaven – intumescent coatings
Highland Galvanisers, Elgin – hot dip zinc galvanising
Barrhead Sanitaryware, Glasgow – vitreous china sanitaryware
Carron Phoenix, Falkirk – stainless steel sinks
RB Farquhar, Huntly – pre-plumbed toilet modules
Balmoral Group, Aberdeen – water and septic tanks
McAlpine Plumbing, Hillington – plastic plumbing pipework
Ozonia Triogen, Glasgow – water treatment plant
Arthur McLuckie, Dalry – iron castings
Weir Group, Glasgow – pumps
Torren Energy, Glencoe – woodchip-fuelled burners
McDonald Engineering, Glenrothes – hot water cylinders
BIB Cochran, Annan – calorifiers and steam plant
Sangamo, Port Glasgow – timer clocks and energy controls
Clyde Energy Solutions, Glasgow – heat pumps and radiators
Norfrost, Caithness – freezers
Eness Lighting, Kirkcaldy – lighting and controls
Coughtrie Lighting, Glasgow – external luminaires
BICC Brand-Rex, Glenrothes – electrical cabling
Parsons Peebles, Rosyth – electrical switchgear
Linn Products, Eaglesham – audio-visual systems
Interplan Systems, Glasgow – cubicle partitions
JTC 65, Dundee – fitted furniture
Ramsay Ladders, Forfar – extending stairs
Fife Fire, Kirkcaldy – fire extinguishers
James Ritchie & Son, Edinburgh – clockmakers
Charles Laing & Sons, Edinburgh – bronze handrails
McPhee Brothers, Blantyre – truckmixers
Albion Automotive, Scotstoun – HGV drivetrain builder
Koronka, Kinross – fuel tanks
James Cuthbertson, Biggar – HGV fittings
Meantime, next time you pore over product catalogues to select a roof tile or toilet pan, take a moment to consider what happened to the British car industry – Rover, Rootes Group and especially Triumph…
