The future needs old fashioned technology

Last week Islington and Camden council’s held an historic joint summit on air pollution. Natalie Bennett reports.

Last week’s Camden/Islington Air Quality summit has been well covered, from a primarily Islington perspective, by both Caroline Russell and Caroline Allen (and the Islington Tribune on the resultant political row), so I won’t cover that ground again.

But I did think a contribution from a perhaps surprising source was worth some attention – that of Justin Laney, Transport Manager, John Lewis plc.

He was interesting on the subject of the co-operative’s experiments with gas-fuelled and electric vehicles. The former are entirely financially competitive with traditionally powered vans, the latter will be if their batteries prove able to survive for the length of their expected life (currently I gathered an uncertainty).

But what did surprise me was his description of how “back to the future” this all was – the firm had extensively used electric delivery vehicles in the past – mostly I gather in the Sixties and Seventies. These were very much specialty vehicles, made for city usage of deliveries over short distances. Expensive, but really built to last – grand milk floats really.

I couldn’t find any pictures of such John Lewis vehicles online, but this site has some similar types, such as that above.

Justin made the point that at this time, thousands of different types of such specialist vehicles were being made by most small, local specialist manufacturers.

That’s a huge contrast to today, where virtually all vehicles are made for highway running at highway speeds (even if many will never get a sniff of a motorway), which means they’re certainly not optimised for the actual conditions in which they operate – and can’t be made to last for the long haul for operations where this is particularly appropriate.

We already know we need to get away from industrialised, globalised agriculture back to something locally based and less fossil-fuel dependent. This was a reminder of how far we also need to change our manufacturing structures for many goods – to get away from globalised mass production of a few types that will then be squeezed into all circumstances, back to localised, craft production that actually meets customers’ needs and uses resources efficiently.

(You can see a complete webcast of the summit here.)

This also seems a good place to issue a final reminder that Mapping for Change and Islington Green Party are holding a public meeting tonight, (Monday28th November 7.00pm – 8.15pm at Highbury Grove School, N5 2EQ.  This is an opportunity to hear the results of recent air quality testing. Speakers include Simon Birkett, of the Clean Air London Campaign, Green London Assembly member Jenny Jones and Louise Francis of Mapping for Change.