A couple of nights ago I got genuinely irritated. Actually, I was fuming. I was making conversation with a pretentious cretin who ‘works’ in the music industry and upon telling him what I did for a living, he openly laughed. Not just a grin, as if to say ‘how unusual’ but an undisguised patronising cackle. He went on to ask if we wrote about badgers.
I can’t begin to say how frustrating I find explaining tunnelling to somebody who hasn’t the first idea of how complex, challenging, rewarding and even exciting it can be. So I asked him how he made his way to the London bar we were in, and was amazed to hear him say with no irony whatsoever, “on the underground”. He must have been referring to that incredible array of tunnels, platforms, cross passages, etc, that just appeared under our capital overnight, as if by magic. Very industrious, these badgers.
I gave him a quick lesson in where he would be without the tunnelling industry (probably still waiting for a taxi) and decided to cut the conversation short on the grounds that I’d rather talk to somebody with half a brain.
But it got me thinking yet again about my pet subject – industry self-promotion. This week we have seen the grand opening of the beautifully refurbished St Pancras Station as part of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, or HS1 as it is now called. This was big news in the media and found decent coverage on all the major news channels and papers. This was mostly based on the fantastic architecture and designs found there, and the fact that it’s the terminus for the ambitious rail link.
But it’s not far out of St Pancras that the rail line heads straight into the much more impressive engineering feat of the London Tunnels, which naturally didn’t get much of a mention.
It would be foolish to claim an 7m diameter tunnel is as architecturally appealing as a large open space such as St Pancras Station, so media coverage is always going to be slim. But why not encourage the media to focus on the techniques of construction instead of the finished tunnel? When my non-engineering friends see pictures of large diameter TBMs they literally can’t believe these things exist, let alone bore under cities the world over.
We may often be limited by the look of our finished products, but definitely not by the skills and tools it takes to make them! We need to be pro-active about this. Let’s make more people aware of what our industry is capable of and wipe the smile off the face of such music industry nobodies whose whole year profits probably wouldn’t re-face a cutterhead.
Tris Thomas
