The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [5]
5.
How ignorant most of us are by contrast, surrounded by machines and processes of which we have only the loosest grasp; we who know nothing about gantry cranes and iron-ore bulk carriers, who register the economy only as a set of numbers, who have avoided close study of switch gears and wheat storage and spare ourselves closer acquaintance with the manufacturing protocols for tensile steel cable. How much we might learn from the men at the end of a pier on the edges of London.
They inspired this book, which the author hopes might function a little like one of those eighteenth-century cityscapes which show us people at work from the quayside to the temple, the parliament to the counting house, panoramas like those of Canaletto in which, within a single giant frame, one can witness dockers unloading crates, merchants bargaining in the main square, bakers before their ovens, women sewing at their windows and councils of ministers assembled in a palace – inclusive scenes which serve to remind us of the place which work accords each of us within the human hive.
I was inspired by the men at the pier to attempt a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning.
i: A logistics hub
1.
Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools involved in their production. They were acquainted with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has diminished almost to the point of obscurity. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.
Critical to both our imaginative impoverishment and our practical enrichment is the field of endeavour known as logistics, a name rooted in the Ancient Greek military figure of the logistikos or quartermaster, who was once responsible for supplying an army with food and weaponry. Today the term is used to refer collectively to the arts of warehousing, inventory, packaging and transport, an industry which counts among its greatest achievements the ‘cool corridor’ between Africa and Europe down which cut-flowers and vegetables travel, the FedEx hub in Memphis, Tennessee, and the development of the corrugated fibreboard box.
2.
In the centre of England, a few miles southwest of the River Avon, near King James I’s palace at Holdenby House, stands a group of twenty-five imposing grey warehouses – of a sort common to the landscapes of all industrialised nations, the kind which line ring-roads and airports, yet rarely explain their purpose to on lookers, mutely repelling the curiosity or outrage they can generate. The warehouses together make up one of the largest and most technologically advanced logistics parks in Europe. Positioned beside three central arteries, the M1, M6 and A5, they are within a four-hour drive of 80 percent of the United Kingdom’s population, and every week, largely at night, they handle a significant share of its supply of building materials, stationery, food, furniture and computers.
Despite their importance, the warehouses have no desire to advertise themselves to the public. They are spread out across a site of determined blandness marked by gentle gradients, ornamental trees and expanses of preternaturally green grass. They have no interest in the problems and possibilities of architecture. They care only for size. One looks up at their cathedral-like