South Riding 13: Horley

I knew this would have changed. It would have been impossible for it to continue. There might still be a small, one bedroom flat above a shop but there is no way that shop would still be a little, general electrical store that sold a few appliances but really specialised in repairs. There are no such shops anymore. 

Changes in domestic technology and their support services are the great signifiers of the times. Such electrical shops were anachronistic, even when I lived here. They were a remnant of an age when types of electrical devices were fewer, they were proportionally more valuable and they could be repaired.  The age of Bakelite. Now we have a different relationship with machines: they are used for all aspects of life, they are infinitely better and more reliable, and they are almost all sealed boxes. For the most part you cannot trace how things work; instead you can look at the patterns on a circuit board. We do not repair – we replace.

This is one of the reasons I like bicycles, think of some of them as aesthetic objects. They might be amongst the last machines where it is possible to see exactly how it works and how it is made. It is completely exposed, everything pared down to the minimum and the perfect embodiment of the Modernist dictum of form following function. At the same time it displays the continuity of its evolution: you can see the principles of design evolved in the Nineteenth Century.

Anyway back to my old home. The shop now sells double-glazing, something about which I have absolutely nothing to say. 

The rest of the street feels just the same. There is a consistency in the dowdy areas of a town.

Here is the iron footbridge, looking every bit of its 100+ years, with traces of rust and neglect. I walked across it not only for nostalgic reasons but because the kid inside me still likes watching the trains pass underneath. Sharing the bridge with me was a mother and young child. The little girl was having a great time waving at the trains and getting very excited when one of the drivers waved back. At that precise moment my spirits lifted and all was well with the world. The driver, the young child, the waving: it could have been my own children, when they were young, it could have been me, or any child back to Victorian times. Damn it - It could have been the 'Railway Children'! 

I came on this cycle journey looking for both change and continuity - and here were both, within a very few yards in a small inconsequential area of Surrey.