This article was taken from the August 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
I spend a lot of time in Derbyshire. I was born there. To southerners it tends to mean the Peak District and clambering about on hills, but to me it's a county of engineering. Derby, when I grew up, was divided between people who built trains at British Rail and people who built aero-engines at Rolls-Royce. The twin highlights of the year were the respective open days when you'd get a glimpse of the Advanced Passenger Train at BR and watch Royces chucking frozen chickens at engines to simulate bird strikes.
If we ever drove into the countryside it'd be up through the Derwent Valley, past scores of abandoned mills -- dark, brooding and enormous. These mills were the first factories. This was where the industrial revolution started -- as technologies such as water power and cotton-spinning were networked together with specially recruited and housed workforces.
But drive past now and it's rather sad -- the whole valley is a World Heritage Site, but there's not much manufacturing left. The mills are mostly shops, fitness studios and new-media incubation units. You can buy golf equipment, seconds china and bird boxes, or you can work on your abs and commission a website -- but very little's being manufactured any more. It's fair enough, I suppose. If you owned a mill, what would you do with it? But it's still depressing, like those mothballed Concordes sitting in air museums, showing how inventive and energetic we can be and how we've chosen not to bother.
Every time I drive past I think about Cory Doctorow's magnificent book Makers and of his visions of new networks and new technologies being deployed to create more personal, less wasteful manufacturing systems. I think about the startups around the world that are planning new ways to make actual material objects that might be of use or delight to people. Suddenly, you begin to see a future for these places that isn't just wellness and websites but involves people with craft skills making beautiful, useful objects.
VC-centric future visions suggest we're going to rebuild the British economy by innovating social networks into synergised transmedia content platforms. That's both implausible and wasteful. We need an economy that makes things again. And I'm not alone in thinking this. The generation that built the web is tiring of the immaterial and is turning back to objects: to 3D printing, to laser-cutting, to Arduinos. And maybe they can -- as with the web -- transform hobbies and eccentricities into industries.
And where'd be the perfect place to do it? The Derwent Valley Mills -- magnificent buildings in beautiful settings, surrounded by skilled and willing workers. Then my mills could come back to life and Derbyshire could birth another industrial revolution.
Russell M Davies heads planning at Ogilvy & Mather and blogs at russelldavies.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
