How London's Crystal Palace was built so quickly
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Imagine King Charles today proposing a 990 000 square foot structure in Hyde Park. Get Design. Build structure. How hard could it be?
Today there are more voices. Queen Victoria simply decreed, and it was done. Today building the structure would be fast. Getting permission to build it would take decades (even for the King) and cost a fortune.
Savehydepark.com would be a domain in seconds.
The mulberry harbours were built in a day with scant regard to the views of the locals.
Parliament sits above the courts as effectively the Supreme Court of the UK, where everybody's interests are notionally represented (the current mis-named 'supreme court' is really just the Court of the United Kingdom). The King, via the Ministers of the Crown, could propose a building as a Bill in Parliament. If Parliament then passes that as an Act, then it will happen and nothing can stop it from happening. Including using the Army to detain and remove protestors if necessary. All it needs is the relevant sections in the Act.
Recovering this power is why Brexit was so important. With it we can build the green infrastructure we need as we built the railways - via dictatorial Acts of Parliament that brook no opposition.
Now all we need are MPs prepared to use that power to save us from oblivion.
https://davidallengreen.com/2023/01/courts-and-politics-and-...
Yet public infrastructure in Britain still costs 2-3 times what it costs in continental Europe. It strikes me that blaming the EU was a very convenient excuse.
Our “sovereignty” hasn’t changed. The NHS didn’t get any additional funding. Trade deals have gotten worse not better. The whole thing was just smoke and mirrors.
Literally the only thing the referendum was sincere about, was David Cameron’s desire to consolidate votes and reduce the number of his own MPs leaving for other right-wing parties.
He succeeded at that, but its cost the economy literally billions.
Now we’re out of the EU that option no longer exists and we can now pass legislation that cannot be stopped by the courts
Like, for example, the High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Act, which passed in 2017 and was pootling through parliament from 2013? i.e. almost entirely before even the Brexit referendum, and definitely before Brexit?
It was passed, deliberately, with thousands of pages of legalese, riders, caveats, opt-outs, etc…
Very different from a one page Act that would delegate supreme power to some HSR committee with the power to destroy anyone who resists.
The UK has a severe problem with NIMBYism; not being in Europe wouldn’t just make that magically go away. In practice, the UK leaving the EU will likely hurt infrastructural development; doing so has damaged the British economy, and the UK now simply can’t afford it (big, forward-thinking infra work is about the first thing to get defunded when budgets are tight, generally, and the British budget isn’t just tight, it’s a black hole).
Once the decision is made the minorities objecting to it can be cleared out of the way - because they have already had their say in Parliament via their representatives.
Also budgets in the U.K. are never tight and we can always afford anything we have the people to do.
Your comment about the Mulberry harbours is quite baffling. Are you seriously suggesting that a modern day military operation on the scale of Overlord would be subject to local consultations?
I think there is a tradition in the UK to assign all government actions to be by the crown. As if the crown takes decisions on everything and everyone else just recommends.
Right... https://www.savewimbledonpark.org/
People seem to get incredibly confused about British constitutional history… No she didn’t, don’t be silly, she wasn’t a dictator. About the only European monarch who could got around decreeing stuff left right and center in this period was the Russian tsar; there just weren’t that many absolute monarchs left.
You’re correct that they didn’t have, like, modern planning law, but it was nothing to do with Victoria.
(reaction from 1851, wikipedia)
One lasted just weeks before it was destroyed in a storm. The other did better, and was used for 10 months.
I once liberated some simmilar bolts from a broken out tunnel wall at Tottenham Court Road. We machined into tensile coupons and they just stretch out like pulling a toffee bar!
It's amusing these days to think of imperial measurements as a great standardising force in the world in light of our inability to go metric.
As always it is not quite so simple. Another early standard thread was the British Association. Proposed 1884, and adopted 1903. It was the recommended thread for small diameters (even by the British Standard institute), and is still seen in electrical terminals, and some small instruments.
BA threads are metric!
And pipe fittings
Screw threads weren’t standardized until the 1840s! That blows my mind.