It’s September 2034. You are gently awoken by the light streaming in through your sash windows, which were recently made legal again. Leaving your Georgian mansion block, you pluck an apple off a heaving bough, and you make a breakfast of it. Today you will be jetting off from the super-spaceport in Avalon, which is the name of the Wales-sized artificial island in the North Sea. To get there, you step aboard a gleaming HS24 train that whisks you past soaring urban skylines. Nobody is playing TikTok videos in the quiet carriage.
You spend an enjoyable day overseeing AI-enhanced chemical engineering in the microgravity of HMSS Beagle, Britain’s rotating, drum-shaped space station. Then it’s back home for lab-grown toad-in-the-hole, which you share with your children, whom you can afford, and your parents, who are long-lived and able-bodied. Another glorious day of Anglofuturism.
In reality, of course, the Britain of 2034 will house you in an ugly little flat, miles from anywhere, if you’re lucky. It will not enable you to work in biotech, because the industry isn’t allowed to build lab space. You won’t have kids, because you can’t afford them, and your parents will be decrepit, because the NHS is unfit for purpose. Everything in supermarkets will be behind locked cupboard doors, and train carriages will be overrun by anti-social oafs. In short, the Britain of 2034 is not likely to be much different from the Britain of 2024.
Most of what we’ve envisioned in our more preferable 2034, however, is possible right now. And it is not only possible right now – it is happening right now. Artificial islands, super spaceports – even high-speed rail. Even sash windows! But it’s other countries that are doing it, not us. Britain was once at the frontier of engineering and innovation; today we cannot even dig a reservoir.
Yet we are at a brief moment in history when the world is becoming full of magical possibility. Artificial general intelligence; biotechnology; space colonisation; these adventures make even robotic stone-carving seem trivial. Ours is a century beyond the most rapturous dreams of any generation before our own.
Anglofuturism is a vision of a Britain that leads the way into this future. We didn’t coin the term, and we don’t have a monopoly on what it entails. But a common thread is ambition – and, more precisely, a willingness to commit to intergenerational projects in order to build a future that feels like home.
We see this ambition in the set of thinkers and inventors who we’ve interviewed this year. Their proposals include that of the large artificial island in the North Sea; the creation of a huge spaceport; the plundering of the planet’s crust for geothermal energy that powers British data centres and much else; the revival of our industrial economy and the opening of new factories; the creation of a million artificial wombs.
We also see it in the new generation of pragmatists who are trying to jolt Britain out of her stupor. There’s the Greater London Project, Future House, UK Day One, and others yet to unveil themselves. Matt Clifford, who is chair of both the UK’s leading start-up accelerator and its national innovation agency, says that Britain could have the highest GDP per capita of any major country. We agree.
How do we get there? Our interviewees’ ideas might help, but plotting the route is more than a two-man job. Still, we think it will help to have a destination in mind – one that is exciting, human-centred and in some ways familiar. Investments in ambitious infrastructure, and the temporary disruption entailed by big projects and major reforms, are easier to tolerate when you know what it’s all for.
As John Ruskin said: ‘When we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, “See! this our fathers did for us.”’
We return to the Britain of 2034. As you listen to the radio – Britain’s GDP-per-capita is now the greatest in the galaxy, you learn – you don your nightcap. It is made of glorious British silk, manufactured on our own sceptred isle.
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