A Tangled Web

Cataloguing Failure 

 

Melanie Phillips has a fine article on the debacle over the repeated closure of the Diana Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park.   This 'fountain', which actually looks more like a partial exhumation of a section of the Great Northern and Metropolitan Sewerage System, has been bedevilled by mishaps since it opened earlier this year, and it is now surrounded by a mesh fence to keep people away temporarily. 



It would not be so disastrous if the fountain was an exception rather than the rule.  However, as Phillips points out, this is yet another in the prominent series of catastrophes which have destroyed the UK's reputation for proficiency in designing and marketing large scale structures.  Moreover, this rapid decline in our image has predominantly occurred under the aegis of a government paradoxically obsessed with the concept of 'image' as opposed to substance.  Firstly, we had the Millennium Dome: an unmitigated failure which now sits empty in London's Docklands looking not unlike an upturned anaemic nipple.  Then we had the protracted closure of the Thames Walkway after it wobbled violently on its first day of opening.  Today we have the Diana Drainage Ditch.



In some respects, these structures are inanimate evincements of the government which supervised much of their respective creations: they look fine on the surface but are dogged by poor quality craftsmanship, administrative errors and subliminal lack of appeal.  What a pity it is then that the British people still wish to see Blair (a man for whom image is everything) in power after the forthcoming General Election.