Yesterday was a
meetup with my cousin after far too long. He took me to Bucklers Hard, a
village on the Beaulieu River which used to build warships back in the days of
Lord Nelson. Fascinating to see how such a modest place could be producing cutting
edge naval technology 250 years ago, just around the time that the industrial
revolution was starting to get a grip on cotton spinning much further north.
Looking at the scale model it becomes easier to
understand the wide space between the houses. Of course it’s an imaginative
reconstruction, but it makes a lot of sense, sets the brain to working. Which a
museum should do.
It’s sad for such a busy working centre of skilled
craft to be reduced to a tourist attraction, but that’s how things go. All the same, I do hope that there will be a
resurgence of new buildings built by hand with time-worn skills comparable to those
that were omnipresent even a hundred years ago.
Maybe the long-promised emergence of universal plenty will…
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