One of the best passages in Tony Judt’s short final book is a mournful section on the lost rites of welfarist citizenship and their sites: the post-office, bus stop, public library.
“Think for a minute about the importance of something as commonplace as an insurance card or pension book. Back in the early days of the welfare states, these had to be regularly stamped or renewed in order for their possessor to collect her pension, food stamps or child allowance. These rituals of exchange between the benevolent state and its citizens... [and] the shared experience of relating to public authority and public policy- incarnated in these services and benefits- contributed ... to a tauter sense of shared citizenship.”
These places and rituals- now being driven to extinciton by a mixture of political conviction and supposed technological ‘necessity’- were in their early years understood by the conceptual model of ‘the Grid’- an allusion to the then recently completed electrical grid. A diagram of the library network in Herefordshire from 1938 demonstrates the seductiveness of the analogy: branches appear as crisp circles or squares, linked by a web of lines of force, as if the whole county were gently humming.
As a map or explanatory tool it lacks a certain something- even for people who knew the county it would have been difficult in many places to work out what was going on. But as a propagandic demonstration of the modern, complex organisation of local amenity it must have been impressive. Nowadays, its attraction is basically nostalgic- it appeals for the same reason that pre-Beeching maps of British railways do (although less, obviously). As much as anything this is because the model of broad, egalitarian and universalist service that it suggests is also one that tolerates extreme smallness of scale and diversity of place. A railway that could tolerate a service for Tumby Woodside or Windmill End looks now, like a bulwark of resistance to the subsequent flattening-out of place and particularity, clone towns and so forth, although whether it felt like that at the time is probably another matter.
One of the most prominent formulations of the political right over the last couple of decades has been to conflate of ‘bureaucracy’ and state management with standardisation, centralisation and distance. But it’s clear that the purpose of the Grid idea was quite different- indeed, its beauty was to suggest that free, universal, egalitarian and accessible services could animate rather than occlude the intimate scale and diversity of the places that it reached.
I’m not proposing to adjudicate on the validity or truth of this hypothesis, although I know what I think. But it is an important idea, and one that I’ll be returning to this theme in later posts, because it illuminates some other things I have been looking at recently.
