The Iron Rail

The Iron Rail’s presence from the beginnings of industrialisation to the present day represents a timeless agent of cultural metamorphosis - in that sense, it is perhaps both strictly functional in a
modernist sense as well as an unchanging ornament, representing an accumulation of cultural change.

Contemporary society and especially so urban society faces ever-increasing complexity. This has been well described by sociologist Ulrich Beck in the Preface to his book ‘The metamorphosis of the World’ where he writes:
    The world is unhinged. As many people see
it, this is true in both senses of the word: the
world is out of joint and it has gone mad.
We are wandering aimlessly and confused,
arguing for this and against that. But a
statement on which most people can agree,
beyond all antagonisms and across all
continents, is: ‘I don’t understand the world
anymore’.

People need a space to play.

The cultural context is, arguably, reminiscent of the period towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In Henry M Seiden’s book ‘Motive for Metaphor’, he refers to the works of
Matthew Arnold such as ‘Dover Beach’ and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘God’s Grandeur’ remarking how they mourned spiritual beauty in the face of the world’s
despoilation. Seiden felt such works prefigured
modernism. Has Beck described a period
prefiguring a ‘second modernism’? 

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