The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Patrick Keiller
not of services but of other manufactured items, in particular intermediate
products (for example, chemicals) and capital goods (power stations, airports).
These strengths seem to match the financial sector’s cultural preferences:
chemical plants are capital-intensive, but do not involve the risks and
ephemerality of product design; exports of capital goods are, by definition,
financed by other people’s capital. The United Kingdom is good at lowinvestment
craft-based high technology, but not at high-investment massproduction
high technology, unless it is owned and financed elsewhere (the
United States, Japan, South Korea, or Germany). The United Kingdom’s
most extensive indigenous high-technology industry is weaponry, in which
investment is supported by the state. It appears that the decline in manufacturing
industry that has been so widely lamented, typically by designconscious
pro-Europeans who grew up in the 1960s (like myself), has been
a partial phenomenon.
27.5 | Robinson in Space. British Steel works, Redcar, Teesside. The works produce
70,000 tonnes of steel per week, much of which is exported. British Steel is now the
third-largest steel producer in the world, after Nippon (Japan) and Pohang (South
Korea).