Why Danny Boyle should be Chancellor / FRHistS

Reports suggest that Danny Boyle’s 2012 Olympics ceremony hugely engaged, if not enraptured, the worldwide audience TV audience. He brought to attention features of Britain and its History. It is worth recall that not only were the English the first modern regicides [Charles I], an action that led eventually, step-by-step, to representative government, later followed notably by the French [1793], Britain was the first to introduce industrial methods of production, followed by the Germans and French some hundred years later, and then by the US and the sequence of industrial societies including, notably and more recently, the Chinese with their industrial revolution. Users of high-spec mobile phones will be aware technological and manufacture change is rapid but History [in the form of 'heritage'] can never be created and changed. Britain has History ‘in spades’. In years soon to begin, Britain can earn needed foreign currency by strong substantial History tourism and huge swathes of manufacture structures should be preserved to this end, not just Cromford, Saltaire, Bournville … helped by Beamish and so on, but much, much more preservation. What is needed is more of a long-tern, strategic, whole-Britain History-trial view and less of local and knee-jerk decisions.

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.