Brexit and our shared Digital Cultural Heritage

It seems that the tide is more clearly turning against Brexit. This is not just reflecting changing circumstances or opinions, but acknowledges two of life’s great distinctions that, at last, are impressing themselves on a wider British audience. First, simply wanting something doesn’t make it so and, second, grasping the nuances that evolve in the journey from wish to deed does not make a person an elitist or, indeed, a scaremonger.

This stark reality was highlighted recently by German politician Martin Schulz on a recent visit to London. He stressed the importance of the EU and UK finding “a way closer, not just on an economic and institutional level, but on a cultural and youth level”. The context was the wider necessity of countries like Germany and Britain optimising the foundations of their cooperation in addressing global challenges, but the key here is the recognition that phenomena like Brexit operate, for better or worse, on many levels. There is never a final determining that something works entirely or equally and forever for everyone, or not. A kaleidoscope of greys evolves in moving beyond thinking about something to actually living it, and to understanding that emotionally aspiring to greater control of one’s personal or national destiny does not arrive simply through wishing for it.

Of course, pointing to the subtleties and nuances that complicate any societal challenge doesn’t change the hard facts of Brexit as a Failed Promise on a fundamentally commercial level. The ever-vigilant Brexit critic and Observer columnist Will Hutton writes scathingly of “the promises made during the referendum campaign: the economic and trade boom, a reinvigorated NHS, cheap food, controlled immigration and a reborn ‘global’ Britain strutting the world,” concluding that “had today’s realities been known in 2016, we would still be EU members.”

Hutton goes on to list several of the means by which the UK’s direction of travel can turn back towards Europe without embracing the full EU re-entry that Keir Starmer appears loath to consider: closer trading standards and mutual recognition of professional qualifications, greater collaboration on energy security, and so on. But to return to the point made by Martin Shulz, it’s not just about the economy. Far too little was made in 2016 of the significant areas of British life where people felt not only that they had sufficient control within a working world that worked, but they were already leading the world: British science, the universities sector, our museums and libraries, the media and Extended Reality and hi-tech industries. And despite seven years of broken Brexit promises, these sectors still thrive and are increasingly taking back control from the forces for whom “taking back control” was a muddle-headed irrelevance.

Witness the vistas re-opening to British science resulting from our imminent return to the Horizon Europe research programme next month. There’s a growing groundswell of advocacy for our re-entering the student life-enriching Erasmus programme, the exit from which was additionally baffling as it was not, and is not, a condition of membership that a country be in the EU to participate.

And then there’s our cultural heritage sector, going increasingly “digital” as a result of 3D, Virtual and Augmented Reality and AI technologies, our gaming industries, and a richly detailed history which helped drive the European Enlightenment and created (for better or worse) a global Empire for which a chief legacy is the language of global business and international relations. Europe is not missing any tricks here: it will be fascinating to see if, despite Brexit, the Europeana Twin It! initiative might find a means of including the UK.

Engineering social media in a digital commons

Blogging colleague Brad Berens writes in his excellent Weekly Dispatch about the bastardising of the term “social media” by the growing tsunami of effectively anti-social media: doubly egregious as so much of it is not only negative and hurtful in effect but is actually designed to be anti-social. It hitches an ethical ride on the assumed goodwill of the world of social support, family pleasures, cat videos, and pollutes the presumed well of good faith hopes and dreams with cynical stokings of fears, ignitions of greed and, in the toxic words of the egregious Steve Bannon, “floodings of the zone with bullshit”.

In the current and intense worrying over the existential threat posed to humanity by Artificial Intelligence (AI), it would probably be useful if we could sort out who owns the Intellectual Property rights to any threat. Given our behaviours in the context of a world where the driving forces of creativity, innovation, and development are solely inspired by our own, innate intelligence, any objective analysis of what risks are posed by AI must wonder if those risks can best be mitigated by keeping AI out of the hands of the world’s Steve Bannons?

But of course it’s more complicated than that. What is designed in good faith and constrained by well-meaning protocols and regulations can be perverted by unconscious bias, by commercial impulses driven by dark external factors, and simply by basically good people not paying attention. It’s tempting to nod approvingly upon reading Carl Jung’s famously bleak account of humanity, when he said in a BBC interview in 1959 that “we need more understanding of human nature, because the only danger that exists is man himself – he is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man – far too little.”

It’s sobering to think that he wrote that within less than a generation of the unspeakable cruelties of the second world war, the unleashing of the atom bomb, and the writings on truth and lies by George Orwell. There was someone who knew a thing or two not only of human nature, but of humanity’s inventiveness in corrupting language in aid of conning people and, in the technocratic euphemism made famous by Edward Bernays, the putative father of Public Relations, when he talked of “engineering consent”.

An irony connected to Bernays is that, while he appears to have turned down the Nazi Party as a client, and was actually himself Jewish, his methods were co-opted by Joseph Goebbels, who created a Fuhrer cult around Adolf Hitler, much to Bernays’ dismay:

“They were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.”

The balancing of social and anti-social impulses is possibly not as old as the hills, but it certainly predates Bernays, Jung, and Orwell. An historically rich article earlier this year in the New Statesman draws some fascinating parallels between today’s world of social media and the intellectually vibrant coffee houses of 17th century London. It explores the opportunity for a sustaining, digital commons in which the power rests with the platform users rather than the owners within an evolved social network that is conceived and launched with a mixed economy of public and private subsidy, but is sustained by community subscription revenue.

No confected outrage allowed, no sticks for poking the circumspect: just a citizen-led platform that is co-operative in the widest sense, focusing on news, discussion, and a magnanimous sharing of wonder at the variations and vibrancy of life.

First Folio Redux

This is not the first time we have blogged about Shakespeare’s First Folio and it won’t be the last. With the quatercentenary of the publication of this famous old book just months away (8 November) we are going to see more celebrations around the world of Shakespeare, most markedly in this week’s convention of the Shakespeare Association of America, meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The list of books inspired by The Book was marked with reviews this past week of Shakespeare’s Book by scholar and historian Chris Laoutaris, and Bardolators worldwide can track the growing First Folio frenzy of activity on a website dedicated to the anniversary, at Folio 400.

Much is made of the act of literary magnanimity with which Shakespeare’s actor colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, toiled to ensure that three dozen of his plays survived to posterity when only half that number had been published during his lifetime. While there is no doubting either the affection or the respect that they retained for their old friend and fellow actor – he had died seven years before the First Folio appeared – there is an intriguing suggestion in Mr Laoutaris’ book that the reputation preservation that was inspiring them may have been as much for the actor who created so many of Shakespeare’s most famous parts, Richard Burbage. It may be that that towering talent had an even higher profile in the public imagination than did the playwright himself, all the more so for his death having been even more recent, just four years before publication. The commercial iron was still hot.

In comparing that commercial environment with the world we live in 400 years later, we can only marvel at how Shakespeare himself might respond to the challenge today of “staging” a performance of Macbeth, for example (one of the plays “recovered” through the curation and publication activities of Heminge and Condell). Even before the advent of the digital age, the technologies of film and audio had opened the world of playwrighting to a world of new audiences, enabling not only the transmission of live performances but also their recording for posterity, enabling a far greater reach for Heminge’s and Condell’s magnanimity than they would ever have imagined.

And now here we are in 2023, with the digital dimension exploding with virtual and augmented technologies, 3D imaging, the vast potential of Artificial Intelligence and a deepening appreciation of the global audience for theatrical experience moving beyond any definition of an “audience” to something far more fluid, diverse, and nuanced. It’s not just that we have brought more people to a space in which a play happens, but we are moving through dimensions of space and time and sentiments to bring the play, the story, the idea to anybody and everybody, everywhere.

The multi-dimensional and multi-axial reality of stories being developed now is moving to a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes authorship. The modern audience’s increasing engagement with the dramatic process of Pick & Mix & Match can only enhance the qualities that, for centuries, have defined the essence of Shakespearean genius: universality and magnanimity. He exercised the technologies of his day in celebrating the wonders and weaknesses of all human nature, sharing them largely without judgement and with a richness of perspective that we can still treasure today.

And before we break our arms patting ourselves on the back for all that our modern technologies of immersive theatre can do to confer ownership of humanity’s story on people everywhere, let’s ask this inspiring question.

Given what we have achieved in delivering Shakespeare’s legacy into 2023, what might we be enabled to conceive of the achievements of future generations – of the Heminges and Condells of the next 400 years?

Making time for Google Maps

By far the most compelling and visited component of the Cradle of English website, at least until we launched our Crane Court prototype immerzeo, was the home page map itself. The idea was simple enough, and still needs a lot of developing, but the history of the creative heartland of London could scarcely be told better than by distinguishing the key historical functions of the City and showing them via a series of filters: this one for the printers, that one for the pubs & taverns, another for the World of Law, and so on. It’s a tribute to the cultural richness of London’s Fleet Street, recognised globally as the traditional home to the newspaper industry, that we are four years into our project and we still haven’t got to Journalism, nor indeed to Coffee Houses.

This month sees the activation of Google Maps on our home page, presenting us with an excellent opportunity to compare the traditional benefits of maps as they have existed for a couple of thousand years, and imagine where they might evolve as they “go digital”, becoming more data-rich in the decades and centuries to come.

Maps in their traditional, two-dimensional livery have beguiled explorers, travellers of all ages, and students of culture and history since the days of drawings on cave walls. They have appealed to human curiosity from all manner of perspectives, seldom as well enumerated as on the “Mapshop” website with its “10 Reasons why maps are important” (judiciously sub-edited):

  • Maps give inspiration: think outside your own world; expand your horizons
  • Maps give stories context: they are orienting machines in a wider context of time, place, and theme
  • Maps make you happy: particularly in the planning of a journey that pre-supposes arrival
  • Maps connect you to your memories: enabling many happy returns to a place visited even just once
  • They provide a blueprint of history, offering a social snapshot of earlier perceptions of a place in time
  • They engage you with a wider environment than occurs with GPS, which grounds you in a single spot
  • Maps save lives, where you can read them. Digital signals in remote areas are not always reliable.
  • Life skills acquired: maps support and encourage spatial thinking – useful in science and mathematics
  • Maps are more broadly useful, about more than just getting from A to B – so understanding the world
  • Simplicity: as visual representations of complicated data they are the pictures worth 1,000 words.

What does Google Maps add to the mix? Simply put, and in a word: immersion. The panopticon cameras that render those 360° vistas confer more of a sense of being in a specific location. Where a place has evolved or vanished over time, you can click on the site of Thomas Paine’s printer for example and, via Google Maps, get an immersive sense of how that place looks today. And in this lies an indication of where cartography of the future could most intriguingly go. Imagine maps that do more than range across dimensions of space, and incorporate the changing of time too.

 

Foundations of genius

Pulsing beneath the surface of our research into the life of William Shakespeare and the publication of his First Folio is the “authorship question”. This “question” is pulsing in the same way that people can still be found who, in the face of evidence and the keenest scholarly research persist in maintaining that the US government brought down the World Trade Centre, the moon landings were faked, the Earth is flat, and Elvis lives. These questioners generally separate “The Man from Stratford”, who is generally acknowledged as an actor of his time, from Shakespeare the Author who has come down to posterity as one of mankind’s pre-eminent creative geniuses.

Their reasoning? The former could not possibly be the latter as there is little in the historical record linking these two entities; the documentary biographical evidence for either Shakespeare is regarded as sketchy at best; and, anyway, the Stratford Man had too humble an upbringing and education to have possibly given us all those transcendent plays and poems, not to mention the vast and inventive range of English vocabulary with which he is credited.

It may or may not be significant that there was little questioning of The Actor’s authorship of The Plays for a couple of centuries after Shakespeare’s death, nor that the “question” – having been pretty much satisfactorily addressed by 20th century scholarship – has flared up again more recently on the more febrile platform of the Internet. But if all that clickbait, all those trollings and flamings have contributed nothing else, they have kept alive a couple of fascinating and enduring questions: what is a genius, and what are its implications?

There does appear to be a consensus that The Actor was a pretty bright fellow but no genius as an Actor: he wasn’t even pre-eminent within his own company. Posterity’s lists of Great Shakespearean actors never include the man himself. Equally, there is little doubt that the author of those plays, whoever it was, was indeed a genius, measured not only in terms of mental acuity but in magnanimity of spirit. Big brain, big heart. But was that chap also The Actor? It’s something of a confusing rabbit hole to start making claims about the documentary evidence for either man, inasmuch as what record we do have points to the same man.

It is the disparity between the creative output and what we know of The Actor/Writer’s humble beginnings that seems to be too much for some people to accept. History is full of genius standard people who excelled despite – or sometimes, arguably, because of – their humble backgrounds: Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, and so on and on. It’s a long list. And it can be argued that what we know about genius might encourage a different question altogether: might the disciplines and structures of more formal “Higher” education in fact have inhibited the driving curiosity of genius as often as they enabled it?

Could the very average actor have been also the surpassing genius who wrote the plays? Our experience of genius – how it manifests, impresses, bounds from point to point with disarming alacrity – suggests that he could well have been the Same Man – and there is precisely zero evidence to suggest that he was not.

Hilary Mantel and the curation of memory

Thinking between the lines of the deservedly respectful obituaries for Hilary Mantel, who died last week, a swelling impression is that she was not so much a writer of historical fiction as she was a curator and philosopher of memory. While librarians and booksellers would be happy for a descriptor that made their filing jobs easy, the emerging truth is that her work was fiction only in the most superficial sense, and historical only in providing subjects who could not sue.

In Hilary Mantel’s dedication to notions of ambiguity and nuance, she was far more interested in the examination of human behaviour and vulnerability, and the means by which these are mediated by memory.

Philosophical speculations about the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice – or even once – come down to appreciation of definitions, context, and perspective. It’s not just about the river, after all: is it the “same” for me as it is for you, and so on. And then in comes the rich imagination of the memorialising Mantel, who conjures not only the differing experience of two different riverbank steppers, but their memories of an intervening time when they spoke about their earlier experiences, since which time their memories have evolved.

Isn’t philosophy fun? And where would it be without humans and history? One obituarist provides a stunning but typical example of how memory can work in ensuring that “history is always changing behind us”. In the first book of the famous Cromwell trilogy, our hero recalls a boyhood experience of watching the burning of a heretic, and the moment reflects a conflagration of innocence. Years later, in the trilogy’s concluding novel, the same memory is recalled but by the older man. It is mediated by subsequent years of adult reflection on the claustrophobic terrors that try to impose limits where dreams used to be. Keeping those dreams alive – in the words of Hilary Mantel, moving determinedly towards the light – is humanity’s enduring struggle.

Here is where, with the help of our more imaginative novelists, we may be on the brink of a revolution in how we tell stories about ourselves: how we write history and step into the past, how we hold it up in our reflective present, how we accommodate the shifting perspectives of memory in retailing what was in the emerging flow of what is ceaselessly becoming. In short, what is the future of history?

Of course it was always about far more than “one damned thing after another”. (Good joke, though) Nor was it, to borrow on another famous thought experiment, a succession of trees falling in the forest, the cacophony of cracking being entirely dependent upon the presence of a hiker with a recording device. The context within which “stuff happens” and, more importantly, is subsequently recalled is what matters. It is our talking about it that enables the enduring immersion in the wider human experience of this fascinating world of trees, and of rivers. And as we listen, see, and feel, it is in our memories that art, and our best historical novelists, emerge.

First Folio Frenzy Builds

Shakespeare’s World is beginning to vibrate in anticipation of next year’s 400th anniversary on 8 November of the publication of the First Folio of the playwright’s (almost) Complete Works. In addition to the marking of the date itself, celebrating the appearance of one of the most consequential and famous books ever produced, the preparations for the Big Day seem to be acknowledging as never before the story of the book’s birth. There’s a story behind the story: in short, the contribution made to the history of publishing and to the wider culture of the world generally of the two actors responsible for the collating and curation of the 18 plays that, without their magnanimous industry, might have been lost to posterity.

The story of John Heminge and Henry Condell is perhaps most succinctly recounted by the memorial erected in their honour more than a century ago in London’s Aldermanbury. One of the panels around its base sums up best both their achievement and their magnanimity in its execution:

“To the memory of John Heminge and Henry Condell / fellow actors and personal friends of Shakespeare / They lived many years in this parish and are buried here / To their disinterested affection the world owes all that it calls Shakespeare / They alone collected his dramatic writings regardless of pecuniary loss and without the hope of any profit gave them to the world / They thus merited the gratitude of mankind.”

Setting aside the many questions raised in considering the curation and production of this toweringly consequential book – what were the protocols for inclusion; what were the allowances for collaborative efforts; how does the story of these actors’ generous industry square with the so-called “authorship question” – there are at least two momentous thought experiments to consider in evaluating their achievement.

The most obvious one is how the world would have been different without those 18 plays that would have joined the vast majority of works produced during the Golden Age of the Elizabethan Theatre, only to disappear into the dustbin of history. Where would we be without those 18 plays, including such household names as Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and The Winter’s Tale? Possibly more interesting is our wonder at the performance history of those plays, and the impact on the cultural history of our world by a few of these plays in particular, where their resonance echoed far beyond their stages?

History scholar James Shapiro puts this question under the spotlight in his book Shakespeare in a Divided America, examining seven of these plays set against key themes of life in that one country. Four of the seven were among the plays rescued for posterity by Heminge and Condell: Macbeth is seen in the context of class warfare and assassination; The Tempest viewed through the prism of immigration; and The Taming of the Shrew against a backdrop of #MeToo and the tribulations of marriage.

His bravura final chapter looks at the production and aftermath of the riotous performance of Julius Caesar in the summer of 2017 in New York City. The portrayal of Caesar as a Donald Trump doppelganger brought out the best and worst of America and its media in considering the implications of public violence and the need for circumspection in being careful what we wish for.

And of course in that play we celebrate too the oratory in the variety of ways in which citizens can be called to action: Friends, Romans, Countrymen . . . Thank you John; thank you Henry.

Metaverse on MetaMars

When Winston Churchill was speaking, in 1939, about Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”, he was at least talking about a real place. His purpose was to acknowledge the reality of the country as being equally menacing and inscrutable and, eight decades later, those adjectives have lost none of their force. The nouns – riddle, mystery, enigma – can equally be applied today to another manifestation of “otherness”, albeit that the inspiration is not to frighten the daylights out of people, but to sell them stuff. The spur to breathless wonder now is the “metaverse”: its qualifying variants on the imputed reality – alternative, virtual, augmented – all play on shadings of substantiveness that are so absurd it’s unreal.

Too little thought has gone into understanding what’s being talked about. There’s far too much glib confidence that we all mean the same thing and seek the same objectives in talking about this thing that is not, in fact, indeed, meaningfully, a “thing” at all. This non-thing features large in the dreams of the teenagers who play the games that drive so much of the technology in this self-imagined world; and it is making careers for breezy marketers with their fantasies about what can be sold to all those teenagers, real and superannuated.

There is a long tradition, in the history of our credulous species, of people who believe something to exist on no greater evidence than their own appetite for it. Do we cheer the legend or the fact; sell the sizzle or the steak? Is the essence of our greed that we want this latest bauble or is it the wanting itself that we want? Paraphrasing Hamlet, we hang on our expectations “as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on.”

Behind the marketing and the insistence that we sell the dream and not the product, the quality of the product remains vital: it matters. NIKE may promote athletic fitness over the fit of its trainers, but the shoes must still be good. Apple may promote the aspirations of genius over the efficacy of its computers, but those computers must still be good. And at a time when we want to market something as existentially significant as a version of Reality itself, we need to be good and certain that we have a grip on what we are doing.

Are the metaverse minions of the future psychically sound and together, capable of moving without tremor between Noddy’s Toytown, a Viking battlefield, and a Second Life in which their boss In Real Life has just fired them? How “real” is their experience of going to a role play in fancy dress set in Roman times but on Mars? Especially if they go there and find it peopled by settlers running from Real Life on our beautiful Earth . . .

Consider how much of the metaverse malarkey is driven in the face of sobering reports about the mental health issues arising from all those Red Bulled gamers struggling to maintain civil interoperability with the humans delivering their pizzas. Look around the world and see the acuity and grace with which we are tackling the challenges of reality as it is. And given what genius and energy has driven innovation over the lifespan of our species on this planet, Earthbound, here: ask this. Given what will deliver the metaverse when it does come, as it will, what are its architects doing today? Are they working with swagger and whimsy, or with data?

How do we define the “language of lawlessness”?

After three dozen blogposts, we have some measure of the moral ambivalence with which the global spread of the English language has been greeted. If it weren’t for the piratical energies of the early naval “explorers” and the subsequent depredations of a ravenously expanding Empire, the summary of an earlier posting (October 2020) might have been able to stand, unchallenged:

“The nugget of wonder (in the Cradle of English) is what innovative collaboration and energy was able to accomplish over a few short centuries in one tiny corner of London. It enabled civilizational advances in law, science, literature, and the highest articulations of human aspiration and liberty. And it was facilitated by the accession of a language sparked by the sheer variety of genius that came together on this ground.”

But of course the pens and printing presses of Fleet Street were only half the story, as what was kindled around the home fires of England played out to much more deadly effect on so many foreign fields that were to be sentimentalised as “forever England” for having been anointed with the blood of English soldiers. And the continuing conflation of the behaviours of Englishmen abroad with the language that they spoke has ensured a steady drumbeat of opprobrium for all real and imagined champions of the “white man’s burden.”

Confusing what one person or group of people aspires to do with what another group of people is actually doing is what drives the narrative mills of hypocrisy, history and, consequently, hatred. The cynicism can be played for laughs, as in Yes, Minister; or inspire poetry; or fuel any number of disputes between bar-stool virtue signallers who would call out the author of the American Declaration of Independence as a slave-holder, characterise the United Nations as a “talking shop”, and nod sagely while pronouncing all politicians as “just as bad as each other”.

A most recent contribution to the debate was noted in a book review in The Observer, celebrating the publication of “Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire”, by Harvard academic Caroline Elkins. While being on the one hand a prodigious feat of scholarship and a frank recounting of execrable imperial behaviours, the book is also credited with a “coinage” that is neither literally true nor an accurate reflection of one of the real and undisputed fruits of London’s history.

“Legalised lawlessness” might seem to have been what was going on. Canny manipulations of the law have been among the tools of trade employed by the evil and corrupt of all empires everywhere and always. But in what we identify as London’s Cradle of English, the ascendancy of the rule of law and the history of radical politics in Fleet Street have ensured a far nobler legacy.

It is precisely because of the freeborn spirit and the exploits of the likes of John Lilburne, Richard Carlile, Richard Cobden, John Bright – the list goes on – that the English language developed a facility for “punching up” and not just down, an energy born in the streets and dedicated to realising the equitable and inclusive dreams of Thomas Paine, born an Englishman but a self-willed citizen of the world.

Fleet Street defined the Public Realm

It didn’t take Covid to get city-dwellers thinking about what attracted them to their city centres, and concluding that maybe home wasn’t so bad after all. The history of the last century, along with advances in communication technology over that same period, have made it ever easier for the world to be brought to the consumer: think remote working, streamed entertainment, delivered shopping and takeaways (more often bringaways).

To the extent that people might be tempted into town, city centres have emerged increasingly as marketplaces where the challenges were logistical – how to get the crowd quickly into, and safely out of, the mall/stadium/concert hall. Less and less over time were cities places defined primarily by the human appetite for company: where getting together just for conversation and comradeship was the whole wonderful point. Then along came Covid, social distancing, and a deepening fascination with the amount of fun to be had in your luxury Lazy Boy.

Now, with fingers crossed that the challenges of Covid are receding and we edge closer to the months of spring’s renewal: how do we go about the challenges of re-imagining and regenerating our city centres, in ways that balance comfortably our worries over climate change with the need to re-ignite economies? And can all of these concerns be accommodated in ways that get large numbers of people back into city centres, and happy to be there?

If the challenge is addressed in the language of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or of the UK’s own Business Improvement Districts, the focus tends to be upon logistical efficiencies, citizen safety, diversity and inclusiveness, greening and open spaces, “smart solutions” to building operations, and risk reduction. Each of these is laudable; all are vital. But for a fresh perspective, let’s consider a case study from history – say, London’s Fleet Street in 1750 – and ask how close it came to the ideal state of regenerated urban spaces.

History tells us that, for all its problems (see below), Fleet Street was such a triumph of co-located genius and entrepreneurial energy that it resembled nothing so much as the Silicon Valley of the 18th century. More than this – and without being consciously minded to achieve anything like a “Public Realm” – it created an extended forum within which thousands of fascinating people foregathered over the centuries to talk politics, science, philosophy, law, medicine, literature: always in awe at what can be achieved by the communities who peopled the hundreds of coffee houses, taverns, and theatres within which a language evolved and the Enlightenment took off.

So no: we won’t get a new dawn of civilisation by installing a water feature here and a few street lamps there. And the price of people being electrified by each other’s ideas is not a return to the conditions of 1750: rats, polluted water, and regular firestorms. With the benefits of modern technology and what we have learned in the years since about the transcending values of historical sensitivity and civilised conversation, perhaps we can achieve the best of both worlds.