l4A^pv( f^Av^LU ri (a- SÄ.V-TQ-SS 4 T- road leather-topped ' desks ^m their old; panelled offices along Bradford's steep industrial streets and waited for it to come back again. Well, most people will be aware that the difference this time was that trade had fluctuated for good and it did not come back. A decline in the British textile industry that had been increasing steadily since the end of the war, and almost certainly had its origins as long ago in time as the sunset years of the Victorian era, intensified; the mills that had managed to hang on with their antiquated attitudes finally collapsed. The industry proceeded to suffer horribly from the effects of cut-throat foreign competition. Much of the cheaper end of the trade that had once formed the bedrock of Bradford textiles went to the Italians. The better quality worsted side was hit by the rapidly-industrializing Third World. An industry that had a workforce of a hundred-and-fifty- thousand when the Conservatives came to office in 1951 had dropped to only forty-thousand by the time they came to power again in 1979, when they prompted a massive industrial shake-out, much of it sorely needed it has to be admitted. Unfortunately the government presided over policies that worked very much to the advantage of the spectatorial, parasitical element of society, of dealers in currency and dealers in other countries' wares, crippling the competitiveness of the productive, active element of society, of the hapless makers of goods in this country, and limiting their ability to recover. And yet despite all of this, in the face of overwhelming odds, the textile industry managed to turn itself round. Bearing in mind that almost three quarters of remaining British textile production is concentrated in Bradford and a handful of surrounding Yorkshire towns, it still manages to be our sixth-highest export earner, selling its goods in a hundred-and-sixty countries worldwide, and manufacturing enough cloth each year to be wrapped around the globe one and a half times. We are all familiar with the contraction of the textile industry, but how many of us could honestly say we knew textiles continued to be one of our major export earners? The success of the remaining firms in Yorkshire lies in the fact that they are now very much closer to the market, and that they are willing to respond quickly to changes in the nature of demand. Things are not easy, and you do not need to speak to very many managing directors to realize this. Representatives go out in search of business with a fierce determination to secure it, and everybody I spoke to reminded me of that fact before they said hardly anything else. It is true that large quantities of jobs have vanished. Over a five or six year period, from the end of the 1970s to about the middle of the 1980s, 50% of Bradford's manufacturing jobs in textiles and its other important industry, engineering, were lost. But textile jobs have disappeared not only because of recessions and industrial shake-outs, but because of the shaking loose of those staid attitudes and dated working methods that for so long hung like a ball-and-chain around the industry's ankles. There is still a need for genuine skills in some areas, such as in the setting of spinning machinery for the production of fine yarns - here the industry has specialized and managed to remain strong - but on the weaving side skills have gradually been squeezed out by the relentless onslaught of better and better technology. Where a man could once work four looms, he can now work twelve, and more often than not their performance will be monitored by computers. Management structure has been tightened up and thinned down. The result of this wholesale restructuring, and a massive investment in better machinery, is that productivity has improved significantly, enabling the industry to perform well throughout most of the 1980s, though it does not need to be said here that under the economic circumstances at the time of writing things have rather tailed off. The companies that have survived have survived largely because they have carved their own niches and got their marketing strategies right. I was shown round Drummond's mill up along Lumb Lane, just off the city centre in Bradford, where there are so many Asians congregated that twenty-five years ago it was known locally as the Burma Road. The mill looks like the archetypal Yorkshire mill massively rearing in everyone's imagination. It still has a towering jet black chimney - no longer used, of course - and a jumble of Victorian terraced housing is gathered all around. But 90% of the cloth woven in that mill ends up in the men's suit departments of some of Britain's most well-known high street stores, thank God. I saw some of it being woven in one of the sheds. There was a tremendous hazy perspective of blurring machinery where the only sharply defined shapes visible were the blue-overalled weavers moving slowly up and down the aisles, scanning the looms. You walked into a veritable wall of sound (the weavers I saw were wearing ear-muffs, incidentally, and I was also offered a pair) that was so phenomenal it actually caught in the throat. It was the sound that used to fill the streets, muffled through thick walls or behind closed doors, suddenly intensifying when you passed an open loading bay, in the area where I lived as a teenager. But all that machinery in Drummond's mill was coming out at Christmas and being updated and replaced in readiness foi the opening up of the single European market. Elsewhere in England someone told me that he thought this country woulc continue to become not much more than a vast warehouse foi South East Asia, and that Britain's remaining industry woulc be crucified when the international barriers finally came down The Drummond Group PLC in Bradford was one of the firms '. saw that was intending to make sure the new trading condition; worked very much to its advantage, and I should say it spok* for much of the Yorkshire textile industry. Many of the other mills in Bradford tend to be concentrated on smaller specialist or emerging markets. For instance, a market that hardly existed at all until comparatively recently was the manufacture of textile fabrics used in the upholstery of new cars. It was not that long ago when cars were still upholstered with leather, and later plastic. Now they are generally upholstered with fabric and that fabric needs to be woven in mills. There are also other industrial applications for specialist modern fabrics that might seem unlikely, that come under the umbrella of the modern textile industry. I know of at least one mill in Huddersfield that experienced phenomenal success during the 1980s and substantially rebuilt and expanded its premises. It might still bear something of a resemblance to the traditional stone-built mill from the outside, or it did until its chimney came down about five years ago. But go inside and you find a ultra-high-technology factory producing the polypropylene fibre used in motorway netting construction, and, when it is blended with other fibres, in the manufacture of a hardwearing carpet. In addition to the vast amount of cloth produced by the industry, some of the more unusual things it makes are the green baize used in the covering of snooker tables, typewriter ribbons, even the cloth that is used to encapsulate tennis balls, I have occasionally listened to arrogant anti-manufacturing persons laughing about the north of England's industrial history during games of tennis on warm summer afternoons. The next time they toss a tennis ball into the air before they serve, they would do well to remember that its hairy surface has probably been woven in British textile mills that are quietly serving them. This is the kind of frivolous, outdated prejudice that the textile industry has been making strenuous attempts to overcome. It is true that you can still walk through the gates into traditional mill yards that look like they have looked for the last hundred years. Out along Bradford's busy Thornton Road, where there is still a sizeable concentration of textile architecture, is situated Daniel Illingworth's mill, where yarn is spun for the Nottingham and Leicester hosiery trades and where yarn was also being spun to make police uniforms when I was there. This is the mill that was used in the film adaptation of Room at the Top. The puddle that Laurence Harvey threw his cigarette-end into, with the tall chimney reflected in the water, is still there in the mill yard after all these years; a detail I include simply because when I remembered it I was taken by the arm to see it. Looking across that expanse of cobbles toward the end of a winter's afternoon, with the sun low in the sky gilding the upper storeys of the mill against the deepening sky, with clouds of your own breath surrounding you in the freezing air, you cannot fail to respond to the awesome sense of presence these old buildings and their great thick chimneys exude, simply as solid objects positioned squarely upon the surface of the Earth. Similarly, you can walk into beautifully panelled foyers that are almost as unchanged as they were the day the last line of mortar was trowelled into position outside during the reign of Queen Victoria. But to keep these observations in perspective, to appreciate that this is far from an antiquated industry propped up by memories of its participation in classic British cinema, you need to keep one eye on the rows of blurred green computer screens flickering through the original ornate etched glass panels of the reception area. You need to listen to the chattering of print-outs coming from behind closed doors. You need to remember that part of everyday phraseology in much of the Yorkshire textile industry today, as it is in many industries, is CADCAM -Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Manufacture. Textile design used to be a very laborious and time consuming process, but patterns can now be changed on screen in a matter of moments, sometimes with clients watching over the shoulder of the designer and making on-the-spot suggestions so they get precisely what they want. That the Confederation of British Wool Textiles, with its headquarters in Bradford, where I spent some time talking with the director, states emphatically first things first -forget the past in a booklet it recently put out, intended to attract young people to a career in textiles, speaks volumes. It makes for an interesting contrast against the general social atmosphere hanging over the country at the present time, where we are busy idealizing the industry of the past and carefully destroying much of our remaining industry in the present. When you drive past Yorkshire mills today, when you climb high above the suburbs and see them rising in the distance above a confusion of tiny rooftops, it is important to remember this. It is important to realize that these fine old buildings, many of which have their upper floors empty but are maintained at the expense of the firm because they have been listed of architectural or historical importance by some sentimentalist in a remote office, who probably sees them chiefly as objects in the distance rising above a confusion of tiny rooftops, belong to a forward-looking, high-technology industry. Are we generally aware of this as a country? We are not. Do we care? We do not. In the meantime, a typically English paradox asserts itself. An industry that continues to be perceived largely as an odorous nineteenth-century smokestack caricature finds itself struggling to be taken seriously in a culture that prefers to settle back and respond favourably to certain of its aesthetic aspects from a hundred years ago instead. This topsy-turvy age of burgeoning rose-tinted Victorian-embracing nostalgia, this gruelling obsession with old industrial artifacts we are living through, does not greatly help the stigma that is attached to modern manufacturing industry in this country. By causing us to look back it does not encourage us to seriously look forward, a fact which is itself merely a reflection of the terrible lack of direction there is hanging over our affairs. One of the detrimental effects of this situation on the quality and flavour of national life is that it affects the way industry in general is perceived, not to mention the textile industry and much of the north of England. Nor does it help the perception of cities in transition such as Bradford, or help wipe away old muck crusted around brassy Fleet Street eyes. The principle in the textile industry of changing untreated wool fresh from the sheep's back into fine cloth or yarn might not have altered for centuries. But that does not mean manufacturing methods have stayed the same, or that commercial applications have remained unsophisticated. Examine the textile industry close up today and you see an industry that is far from 'quaint' for heaven's sake. And it is not an industry that is superfluous to our transition into an 'advanced information-based economy', as a number of clever economists with no social dimension to their thinking arrogantly believe in the present intellectual climate. But though we are on the slippery slope and have not yet managed to loose our footing entirely, I fear there is not much likelihood of these realities being seriously comprehended. Our culture is too deeply mired in decline, our clever economists too prosperous and remote from everyday society for that to happen. The scandalous ruination and maltreatment ol British industry will doubtless carry on unabated. Meanwhile. a number of respectable public figures with comfortable soutf. country majorities, who genuinely believe that recessions are z result only of inflation getting out of hand, who remain obliviou: to our underlying economic and cultural weaknesses that an themselves linked to why inflation gets out of hand, will remaii impervious to the fact that their country is slowly degeneratini into an unimportant third-rate power living on the sentimenta proceeds of past imperialist glories. This should appeal to th economic wisdom of the Machiavellian harbingers of permanen mass unemployment, and its incumbent social problems, wh scurry to set up production lines in the cheap labour countrie of the East, like the idiots who fell over one another to sell too] and materials to Hitler when he was arming Germany in th 1930s. Two Faces of Sheffield I travelled the short distance from Bradford down to Sheffie using the M62 for a little while, then the Mi. As I overto« the thundering articulated lorries, it struck me that this was useful way to approach the capital city of South Yorkshire, for during the nineteenth century, industry and population becar concentrated around the then new and expanding railways, th much the same processes are at work today with motorways ai lorries. At the point where the Mi bisects the lower Don Vail at junction 34, and Sheffield spreads itself in the distance o\ to the right, the carriageway becomes a double-decker ro bridge, and what you see gathered alongside that bridge j> there is one of the clearest indicators I know to the de changes underpinning the social and economic dichotomy our age. On one side are two giant concrete cooling towers, around which is gathered a clutter of industrial paraphernalia and railway lines spanning a hundred-and-fifty years. In the background at the other side is the extensive factory works of British Steel Stainless, its perimeter fences coming almost up to the northbound hardshoulder, and, with its smokeless countenance, its giant corrugated simplicity, and its acres of perfectly landscaped grass, looking more next century than last. Crawling up from the belly of the valley are Sheffield's great swathes of socialist housing - council estates and dozens and dozens of high-rise tenements seemingly grafted to the hillsides and visible for miles around. Before you, and suddenly roaring up far too close behind you flashing their infernal headlights, teem the articulated lorries to and from the country's, and Sheffield's, neat new industrial estates. But it is when you contemplate what lies immediately adjacent to the bridge on the Sheffield side that you begin to get an inkling of the world that is being shaped around us, not only aesthetically, but culturally and economically and anything else important you can think to include in major social generalizations. For here, a much-needed splash of brick-and-green domed fantasy against the surrounding grey monotony, where only a very few years ago there were still scum-coated streets crossed by railway lines through which I used to pass by coach to see my friends in London when I was a student, where the very tail-end of Victorian industrialism belched steam and smoke from yards piled high with rusting scrap iron, has been built one of the biggest shopping centres in Europe. It is called Meadowhall. They don't tack on 'shopping centre' to the end of its official title as they do with most places, but describe it simply as 'Meadowhall'. With its own High Street and its fashionable Park Lane the idea is, I suppose, that it is so big they want people to get into the habit of thinking about it as though it were just another suburb, a new sector designate of Sheffield like a small town or village. Indeed, with its palm trees, its tacky Mediterranean facades and plaster columns (they sound hollow when you knock them), with its ambiguous mixture of Art Deco-cum-Victoriana styling, Meadowhall is not so much a shopping complex as a small town within a town, or perhaps more specifically one ought to describe it as a giant retail theme park, superintended with the same calculated commercial intentions as any overblown Disneyworld. It is fascinating to observe the contradiction manipulating the ideological free-marketeers who denounce social planning of any kind, who claim society's structure should be determined entirely by market forces, when much of the way market forces work is contrived to influence society's structure in a way that is anything but natural or spontaneous. In these big shopping malls you have this hypocrisy thrown at you by the bucketful. Nine-million people live within an hour's drive of Meadowhall. It claims to employ seven-thousand people, not many of them ex-steelworkers I should imagine, but passive school leavers versed, no doubt, in knowing how to win friends and influence people, seeing as they are generally no longer required to produce the goods that many of them sell. MacDonalds had their busiest first hour of opening at their Meadowhall unit than anywhere else in the country, The millionth customer entered the centre's temperature-controlled, air-conditioned environment when it had been open for only ten days. It has a full-time Show Director to choreograph an in-house store of entertainment. It has its own TV station offering studio and production facilities, advertisements playing out, along with Warner Brothers cartoons for the munching children, on a gigantic 'vidi-walľ prominently positioned in The Oasis food hall, the biggest restaurant in Europe (actually a number of cafes combined), and cooking up some twelve-thousand meals daily. Meadowhalľs Lower High Street is supposed to be one of the busiest high streets in the land. It has its own transport interchange and its own ring road, can accommodate up to four-hundred coaches daily, and has buses and trains arriving every few minutes from a catchment area extending across several regions. It is hardly surprising, then, that with all this hustle and bustle, the colossal number of visitors shuttling to and from Meadowhall on Saturdays (thirty-five-thousand vehicles) prompted one of Sheffield's traffic engineers to claim that it is like dealing with two Wembley Cup Finals on the same day, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. The place captures in an instant the drive behind the consumer-led energy that ruled in the 1980s, of the continuing de-industrialization of Britain. I had already been near a complex of this type on Tyneside. The MetroCentre at Gateshead began the trend of fantasy land megamalls back in 1987. There are similar structures at Dudley in what used to be described as the Black Country, and at Dartford in Essex. But Meadowhall, which is rather better looking, with its large central dome and spoke-like configuration, and is a little softer on the environment than its predecessor further north, is fairly centrally positioned and presented itself quite conveniently during the course of this English journey, when I was making my way down toward the Midlands. It is obvious that Meadowhall has been successful. The Christmas-shopping crowds I mixed with that day, which presented a reasonable cross-section of social types, from leather-skirted Harrogate sloanes through to cloth-capped very broad-vowelled pensioners, were ample testimony to that. But it does seem almost statutory for any thinking person these days to dislike modern shopping centres. Most of the people I know rarely have anything favourable to say about them, and in talking about them usually begin by making criticisms that promptly descend into witticisms. I was thinking about this when I parked my car in the largest retail car park in Europe when I arrived at Meadowhall (twelve-thousand spaces), on an area of tarmac big enough, I am certain, to accept light aeroplanes, walked through the House of Fräser where there was a bow-tied young gentleman playing a glass grand piano, and entered the main atrium. If it is the prevalence of artificial light that often disconcerts people about these places, in addition to the emphasis on artificial sensations and fabricated reactions, then I was pleasantly surprised to find inside Meadowhall that the central avenues were lit almost entirely by natural light. What I disliked about it, and this is where shopping malls fail in their attempt to compete with outdoor shopping in a controlled environment, is that you have no landmarks to guide yourself so that you know roughly where you are at any given time. Walking along normal streets there is usually something in the background by which you can place yourself geographically, perhaps a distant hill or a building. But in these giant shopping malls you are forever coming back on yourself and getting lost. Everything looks the same, and once the avenues are thronged with wall-to-wall bobbing heads a strategy for going about your business efficiently becomes impossible. You find it difficult to know precisely where you are, so that if you want to get back to your car, for instance, never mind go back to a shop you saw earlier, you can spend ten minutes trying to find the entrance where you originally came in. This is hampered by the constantly-shifting morass of figures not being cleaved apart by roads or traffic. I heard one woman that morning, who spoke with a southern accent, say to her husband, from the top of one of the grand marbled staircases, that it 'looked like a bloody football crowd down there'. That was very apt. Amidst that glut of humanity I thought I had taken the correct turning to find a cashpoint, but the next moment I was passing the same shop I had noticed a few minutes earlier when I thought I was walking in an entirely different direction. This happened again and again and was due partly I should think to the underlying proclivity of these malls being to deaden sensation. Like many things in a world of increasing technological perfection, they tend to remove the need for thought or feeling and immunize the need to perceive creatively. The point of moving through a real townscape to me is that you experience changes in shadow and light, you feel the wind or the rain, you see condensation on shop windows, smell pastry and coffee as you pass doorways, observe the pattern of street-lights reflected in wet gutters, all of which serve to remind you that you have faculties and that you are actually alive. The temperature inside shopping complexes is generally controlled, so that you need not bother with scarf and gloves during winter, and therefore need not build up a natural appetite and appreciate more spontaneously the comfort of a hot drink or a meal. In real towns and cities, you can sit and eat your lunch and watch the activity out in the street - one of the most interesting pastimes I know - not merely the shuffling crowds, but passing lorries with names and phone numbers painted on their sides, men arriving to clean windows, aircraft flying overhead, all of which encourage you to contemplate the interconnecting nature of society and of the wider world, that people are going places and things are happening beyond the confines of your own tiny bubble. But these giant centres never really arouse in you a sense of wonder, perhaps only a sense of unease. I wonder whether or not, by bringing vast crowds of people together beneath their domed roofs for the rather self-indulgent act of leisure shopping, in a curious way they encourage people to become less sociable and to grow mentally further apart by forcing them to think about themselves. They seem to have evolved under the pretext that people visiting them will wander aimlessly, their thoughts occupied with canned music and little electronic voices telling them where to spend their money, instead of going into a shopping area to purchase something for a specific purpose, then getting out as quickly as possible to do something constructive, as many of us do. You simply move from one evenly-heated space to another, upon which nature plays none of its special tricks or works any of its exquisite wonders. Perhaps I am missing something important here and the Meadowhall crowds were all being highly amused at my expense. Perhaps like many people who are ruminative I tend to see virtue only in the sublime and am possessed by the instinctive urge to analyse things instead of merely accepting them as they are. Maybe this synthetic perfection is really all very desirable. Maybe once you have become conditioned it is possible to enter a sort of consumerist stupor that enables you ultimately to evolve to some higher level of consciousness so that in the end you can become truly content by not bothering yourself with such trivialities as the whims of the English weather. But I doubt it. If it is possible to attain a different level of consciousness, I suspect it will be because the mind will have been diverted from the need truly to think constructively for itself and will have degenerated into a sort of pleasure-seeking vegetable on legs. We might not have 1984 totalitarian-style thought control, Big Brother's face staring from a telescreen set into the wall, and everyone wearing the same blue boiler-suits shuffling morosely along dim-lit corridors. But we might have gigantic 'vidi-walls' pushing our thoughts along in a particular direction by encouraging us where to go, what to do, what to wear, and ultimately what to think. We might have television sets in our living rooms, not dictating to us menacingly but titillating us, shaping the culture of what we think we know. We might have the spending power and the freedom to clothe ourselves democratically, and shuffle contentedly up and down brightly-lit shopping malls, whereas subconsciously we might find we are in reality conforming to an overall dreary monotony which is merely boiler-suit standardization in another calculating, if frivolous, disguise. Perhaps that frivolity is in the end more dangerous to the human spirit because having achieved eternal synthetic happiness you are never morose enough to strive toward something better. Of course, consumer society has been the focus of enough suspicion and the butt of plenty of jokes, and no doubt there are astute people who would claim it is harmless and that the confusion of shopping malls adds an element of mystery and adventure to modern leisure shopping. But in Meadowhall I kept arriving back at The Oasis, and began to get slowly infuriated in the process. I do not consider myself especially claustrophobic, but I came as near to feeling it as I have done in a long while when I was inside Meadowhall, and by lunchtime that day my overriding awareness was of the urge to get away. Meadowhall was built on the site of one of Sheffield's biggest steelworks, and it is this that places it into a wider context when you walk about the car park outside. For in addition to being considered for a long time to be the poorer end of Sheffield socially, still with some very rough quarters indeed around the decayed back streets and old pubs of Attercliffe, this eastern quarter of the city has traditionally been the industrial end too. In the background when you arrive and depart from Meadowhall is the continual basso-profundo wheezing-and-thumping of some kind of huge industrial hammer coming from inside the British Steel works situated just across the way. I had the opportunity of standing next to that hammer when I drove back to the steelworks the following morning, and, after being shown an introductory film and given an introductory drink, was taken right around the plant. The steel industry in this country is now a highly-efficient and competitive business, no longer dogged by the industrial relations problems that threatened to destroy it during the 1970s. The hammer I heard from the car park at Meadowhall was actually stamping flat large steel ingots under enormous pressure, then feeding them between massive computer-controlled rollers that were capable '34 Ľ.1NU1.A"Ľ. ItllO tfUlLili.u of squeezing the hot material to within thousandths of an inch. But that came later. It was what I saw at the beginning and throughout much of the morning that summed up everything I had always imagined to be the gargantuan forces capable of being harnessed during steel production, of the monumental yet oddly graceful business of steel making itself. This plant is one of the world's most advanced steel-making facilities, and concentrates on the manufacture of one of several different grades of stainless steel (British Steel manufacture heavier grade steel up in Middlesbrough) that is made chiefly by recycling scrap. It was this operation -what they describe artfully as a 'meltdown' - that summed up the Promethean grandeur of the steel industry when I was in Sheffield. Priestley described shipbuilding on Tyneside, of bending iron and riveting steel against steel, as being 'man's work'. So is steel making, and I don't much care if it sounds dated or sentimental to say it. Advanced technology, robotics, space travel, microchips, all these things astonish and reflect the ingenuity of humankind, but they are nothing compared to the scale and power of heavy industrial processes like steel making, however many computers are keeping their eye on its fabrication today. I suspect it is because the explosive nature of steel making is reminiscent of what we imagine to be the forces that created the Earth itself, that from time to time are capable of rending the planet asunder, and hence they awaken in us some deep empathy toward cosmic powers that remains buried at most normal times. So that it can be melted down, the scrap stainless steel is loaded into a huge bin called an electric arc furnace, which has a lid like an old fashioned pressure-cooker that swings out of the way until the container is filled. Though my guide described the great bins carrying the scrap to the furnace every few minutes politely as 'ladles', these were no mere oversized caricatures of kitchen utensils suspended from quaint wooden beams in authentic farmhouse kitchens. They were massive bucket-shaped bins a couple of storeys in height that weighed upwards of fifty tonnes. Protected by asbestos-type clothing, safety helmets, and goggles, the two of us walked along narrow catwalks above tiny figures and diggers flickering stroboscopically in shafts of daylight slanting through open doorways far below, and watched these bins being hoisted to and fro. Everything was shimmering from the heat. There were enormous dark objects, momentarily touched by a rim of fire, forever moving through the smoke in the background and suspended on the end of awesome crane hooks fashioned from layer upon layer of steel plate several inches thick. In another direction, through the vast opening of an adjoining shed, the great hardened ingots were suspended beneath gantries, moving vertically at the same time as they were moving horizontally, computerized LEDs measuring the weight in tens of tonnes and superimposing themselves vividly against the brown darkness. Nearer to us, molten metal - somewhere in intensity between molten lava and liquid gold, with the surface of black clinker bubbling from the heat as though it had only lately gushed down from the mountain - was being poured, as effortlessly as one bowl of soup into the next, from one gigantic ladle into another. It was this constant feeling you had that enormous vague shapes were moving continually on the end of thick cables, their perspectives forever shifting and overlaying one another, that gave everything a tremendous sense of energy. »Running throughout was a relentless thundering of sound that somehow got beneath the fillings in your teeth. The blackness would suddenly explode, and showers of sparks would chase one another across the floor of the factory and men would dance out of the way. We watched the giant bins full of scrap hoisted with a lumbering dinosaur-like motion into position by a crane operated from a tiny control-bubble somewhere beneath the ceiling, then, with an ear-shattering clatter, tens of tonnes of scrap stainless steel was shot into the empty container. The sound was fantastic, like the noise of church bells falling down heaven's distant stairs, and you were only left wondering how close you could stand to such a racket without suffering some kind of permanent damage. To generate the 'meltdown', colossal graphite prongs several feet in diameter are slid vertically through holes in the lid of the closed furnace. They resemble the oversized bars of a giant electric fire, and as they are lowered into position, the scrap steel screams and rends in agony as the prongs bury themselves in the bowels of the container beneath. There is a pause and then i3u it begins. Thunder and lightening slowly surrounds you. The graphite prongs start to turn molten orange and have enough power put through them to power a town the size of nearby Doncaster. Again the fillings in your teeth are disturbed as molten electricity grinds and crackles and turns more than a hundred tonnes of solid metal back into liquid. Nothing impressed me during this journey more than the sight of steel being made in that giant smelting plant in Sheffield. The thick electric cables powering the graphite prongs jumped and twisted and thrashed as the power surged through them. Sparks and smoke and flames licked out from beneath the closed lid of the furnace, turning from red to purple as they found their way between the gap and suddenly touched the air. Miniature bolts of fork lightening crackled upwards. That was the moment when you felt like you really were staring at something that verged on the phantasmagoric. The sound was unbelievable, easily the loudest I have ever heard, and so powerful that in an odd way it began to bring a lump to your throat as you stood there and stared. There must have been something close to atomic fusion, to the act of universal creation itself, going on inside that blazing cauldron during those pandemonious minutes. It was as if an immense ball of energy were straining to be free. Never have I felt so near such a colossal harnessing of energy, of such raw inestimable power. Just as you wonder if you have been staring into the depths of an active volcano, into the gaping maw of molten hellfire, as if that were not impressive enough, alongside the furnace the extraction chamber comes into life, and into that are blasted the fumes built up during the meltdown. As I try to convey the feeling of this steel making spectacle, it occurs to me how words are such feeble things. I say that this fume extraction looks exactly the same - and sounds just as loud -as a rocket erupting into life moments before it leaves the pad. But how can that awesome sight be seriously conveyed upon the two-dimensional restriction of a sheet of paper? These fumes are filtered and recycled, which explains why, when you are driven onto the British Steel Stainless site, there are no chimneys pumping filth into the Sheffield sky and clogging the lungs of slum children any more. Concentrate on that solid column of fire thrusting sideways into the extraction chamber and you are looking at the close up shots of one of the space shuttle engines on Tomorrow's World. There seemed little to distinguish one blast of energy from the other, and it is only astonishing that the whole smelting apparatus bolted to the concrete floor ofthat steel plant, perhaps the entire Shepcote Lane works, did not lift off as well, so awesome was that immense crescendo of power. These steelworks are so big that you do not walk from building to building, you drive between them. We went back out into the sunlight again, back into the twitter of birdsong on a dazzling late-autumn morning. When I was shown the rolls of finished stainless steel gleaming innocently in the storage sheds, waiting to be despatched and transformed into sinks and cutlery and buildings and a hundred other industrial applications, the surroundings seemed almost peaceful. No doubt my ears were numbed.