This is is my kind of civic fun and it'll also be considerably cheaper than the Olympics. It's something I think of whenever I swim in any of the lidos. They're all over a hundred years old and built to last.
I'm just not convinced by the Olympics. Plus a cheap bike or free ping pong table will never need a rapey CCTV mascot to sell it as a good idea.
Other stuff is the Dan Dare artwork in the Science Museum - well worth a look.
It's part of a whole exhibition about the white-hot heat of optimism that gripped Great Britain after the war and propelled the country's industry to invent such greats as the hovercraft. Oh and give plucky schoolboys, such as my Dad, the Eagle comic. We will walk on the moon and it'll be a Brit and he'll fly (steady on chap, she won't be a woman), there in a Hawker Siddley Space Kestrel. Or something.
There's a great doc made by Jonathan Meades on the subject. Search Meadeshrine at YouTube. I think it's called, 'Whatever Happened to the Future?'
All those hopes and dreams were smashed by the radical overhaul of culture in the sixties and then the shortages in the seventies. But don't feel sorry for 'em. Nobody made them listen to Cream and smoke jazz cigarettes. I've seen my Dad's record collection so they sowed the seeds of their own destruction.
It's no wonder when Thatcher turned up copping Reagan's idea of going back to the good 'ol days, and promising to put the Great back before Britain, we said 'yes please'.
At least we got a good comic out of it - 2000AD. Judge Dredd was just the sort of thing to prep a young man to reject formal authority figures and welcome in a leader who wants to be our friend. Things can only get better. Oh.
Anyway, this brings us rather neatly, or not, back to whacking a ping ball around with my son at the Barbican - that modernist, cultural experiment you could argue is a success, if you don't have a pushchair. A free ping pong table and a cheap bike and I'm prepared to believe Boris could be a good mayor. I'm so cheap.
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