Artificial Islands

 Of course, Britain is surrounded by more islands than just those in the channel. Owen Hatherley's new book, Artificial Islands: Adventures in the Dominions begins and ends in two very different examples: the Isle of Wight, on the South coast; and the Orkneys and Shetland in the far North. In between, Hatherley ranges from one side of the globe to the other, to see what Britain's former Imperial possessions in Canada, New Zealand and Australia can tell us about the post-Brexit fantasy of a Neverland called CANZUK, in which we will replace all our trade with the EU seamlessly with a share in the bounty of our Atlantic and Pacific cousins - you may recall Boris Johnson, our former Prime Minister, trying to get us excited about TimTams and trading Marmite for Vegemite (anyone who has tasted both knows whoever gets left holding the Australian spread has gotten the worst of that deal). 

CANZUK, of course, is baloney. Our former possessions are doing well enough alone, trading much more with their geographical neighbours than they do with us. But that doesn't mean that looking at those countries, or rather at a selection of the largest cities in them, can't tell us something useful about ourselves, whether that's how our ex-colonies regard us, or the ways in which they have, as in New Zealand and Canada (decidedly less so in Australia) shouldered issues of decolonisation we in the mainland still prefer to shirk - until we're forced to consider them by the splash of statues falling in the harbour, anyway. 

Tellingly, as Hatherley notes, Australia is the CANZUK nation that looms largest in the minds of Brits dreaming of a life abroad, and that isn't unrelated to their being far less decolonised than New Zealand or even Canada. When the apartheid regime fell in South Africa, a lot of whites who didn't like the idea of competing on a (slightly) more equal playing field flew North, to the UK, which should tell us something: and now that black anger at injustice is getting louder over here, Boers and Brits alike look with hope to Terra Australis, whose government, with their 'Australian style points-based immigration system' (a formula by now so rote that it's a wonder politicians don't routinely elide their consonants when saying it - 'Australiansilepoinsbasedimmigrashunsistem'), have been putting immigrants in filthy, suicidogenic foreign camps since before Priti Patel first started making eyes at the Rwandan ambassador. 

But even Melbourne - known, Hatherley relishes informing us, as Batmania for its first two years, after its original governor, John Batman (no relation) - is not just England but sunnier. And it just gets weirder from there, culminating in a trip to the incredible Ville Souterraine in Montreal, an underground megastructure which allows the people of that city to enjoy urban life despite the extreme chill of the Canadian winter - a way of life which may well become more common as climate change renders the outside world less and less hospitable to human survival. 

Montreal's Underground City

Culminating, but not concluding. As mentioned above, Hatherley finishes his book in Shetland and the Orkneys, islands unusual in having voted to leave neither the UK nor the EU which nevertheless describe trips to the mainland as 'going to Scotland' and whose political fringe maintains 'that the annexation of the Northern Islands was legally dubious and that therefore, they are still de jure an integral part of the Kingdom of Norway.'  

As with our trip to the Channel Islands yesterday, then, we find even at the extreme fringes of the islands the same cussedness and faction-forming as on the mainland, even if our cranks are more likely to attribute magical powers to Magna Carta or believe that quoting a verbal formula renders them impervious to police powers - or indeed to subscribe to the New European and Supertanskii's patreon. Hatherley ends his reflection on the former Dominions and their amputated Metropole with a clarion call to destroy capitalism, which is, at this point - as much as Liz Truss might not like it - the only move we can make if we want to survive, above ground or under; but I found myself wondering about his title. CANZUK, for sure, is as bogus an idea as Batmania, but I wondered if that was the only artificiality being described by the title. All the cities Hatherley visits were once tied much more firmly to our Empire, then gradually decided to go their own way: now that centripetal drive seems to have infected the Home Country, and in the wake of Brexit and the novel coronavirus, and staring at an economic crisis of barely-comprehensible proportions, people are more willing than before to consider radical solutions, including independence and secession, especially as it becomes more and more obvious to anyone outside the Home Counties that this country is largely ran in the interests of the reliably Tory South-East at the expense of all other points of the compass. In Montreal, Hatherley, investigating the landscape left behind by the 1967 Expo, discovers a literal artificial island, the Ile Notre-Dame - but this book left me wondering if it's our own archipelago which is truly artificial.