Going Underground

Dublin Metro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Good Lord! Dublin to get a tube - or at least part of a tube a 7 km double tunnel deep bore through the city centre with some cut and cover further out and then another 1.5 km of deep bore under the airport (total line length of Metro North is 17 km; there is also a Metro West, but that is entirely above ground). I wonder if the credit crunch will kibosh this (or whether it is in actually really much more than fauxprosal as it is currently described). I am strangely reminded of childhood days of fantasising about a Preston Monopoly board - and a Preston TV station. I realised quickly enough that such things were indeed fantasy. Of course, it is probably harder to get a traditional Monopoly board now than some special edition (we've had Wigan, Ipswich, Bournemouth and Poole as well as Lancashire, but not Preston itself yet). Local local TV though remains a dream. Local newspapers, such as the Lancashire Evening Post, have their issues (so to speak) and probably more so now than in the 1970s, but they don't suggest that the notion of good local local TV is a contradiction in terms (Look North (West)/Northwest Tonight was a formative influence on me and showed that it was possible to produce worthwhile regional programming, in the 1970s anyway, although it probably helped that the North West is a reasonably coherent and cogent geographical region, at least compared to some TV regions, although, of course, the news was heavily biased towards Manchester, which, given that I didn't go there until November 1983 when I was 15 (with my brother to visit Games Workshop in the Arndale Centre - I bought a copy of the James Bond 007 RPG and SORAG, a Paranoia Press Traveller booklet on a Zhodani intelligence service - I still regret that I did not buy the Tarsus:World Beyond the Frontier boxed module - just looking at this stuff now is making me weak with desire (and nostalgia); I think I am going to faint), meant that much of it had a slightly unreal quality to it - the world was a big place to me in those days.

"The programme previously covered the Isle of Man, but that is now covered by BBC Wales Today." I remember the Isle of Man being covered on Look North. Presumably the coverage being hived off to BBC Wales is part of some internal land grab: "The Isle of Man is part of the Celtosphere and in these days of devolution news coverage of it should be provided by fellow Celts out of Cardiff." I presume that coverage is actually provided out of a North Wales studio, but whichever way this makes as much sense as Cornish news being provided by BBC Wales.

There was also Granada Reports and Granada had the reputation as the most intellectual of the ITV franchises, but it was still ITV and I ddn't see it as much. I note that they had studios in Blackburn and Chester until 2005 and still have one in Lancaster. One would have thought that with the price of televisual equipment these days, it wouldn't cost much to run a small news studio, but I suppose the costs are in things like the rent on the building space.

Of course, unlike the Australians and New Zealanders (and there is surely a novel or at the very least a short story there), the Irish have long had their own Monopoly board for Dublin. I recall from The Monopoly Book that  one of the railway stations was actually the bus station (there were also two airports, but consider the Atlantic City board). Brady's book was good for the time (written early-mid-1970s), especially for a ten year old - I recall it was bought from Mears' in Garstang - but it hoved to the Official Story of the Origins of Monopoly: the true history is much more interesting and unexpected. The fact that the Dublin board only had one station made me aware of just how small Dublin was compared to London. When I went there in 1998, it reminded me of Liverpool. This was just at the beginning of the Celtic Tiger era and I imagine it has changed a great deal now. At that time, pretty much only the area around had Temple Bar had been redeveloped. But then I imagine Liverpool has changed. Of course, Liverpool does have a metro (of sorts) and recall extensive coverage of the opening of its underground stations such as Moorfields and the deep platforms at Liverpool Central on Look North in 1977. I don't know if at the time I ever dreamt of a Preston Underground. I know that in the 1990s, when tram scheme were popular, there were proposals for what I think was branded the Lancashire Metro, which would have involved building a large number of new stations on the existing lines between Preston and Lancaster, and Preston and Blackpool. My google-fu is weak today, but I think there might be a map in the Preston Bus book I have at home. The tram schemes constantly return, but it will take a new technoeconomic paradigm before anything more ambitious happens in either Preston or London. We should at least get Crossrail 1, but it would be grand to one day see something more exciting in Brentford.

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Comments

[Celestial P C C Weasel]

My comic mentions the metro so it appears not to be a profauxsal.

Birmingham is a very good example of the profauxsal being the enemy of the proposal, all sorts of people say 'oh, we shouldn't have a light rail metro we should have a proper blah blah' and thus consultants write reports for things that are never going to happen.