From Network Rail to the National Gallery, a world of dazzling creativity eludes our attention
Once I saw merely bridges, tunnels and stations, and mostly I didn't even notice these, so busy was I rushing to get over or through them. Now, I see a delicate ecosystem of rivets, cleats, plates, gussets, joggles, spans, arches, ribs of attenuated iron and steel.
Scholars can already study railway archives in repositories all over the country, but Network Rail has just put part of its beautiful archive of Victorian and Edwardian infrastructure diagrams on the web. This amounts to an invitation to anyone, anywhere, to contemplate such images out of sheer curiosity and love of beauty. They give us plans of the high-level bridge at Newcastle upon Tyne, with its columns trailing down the screen like tall sepia waterfalls, and Bristol's neo-gothic Temple Meads station, in ethereal ink outline. The Forth bridge of 1890 appears side on, elongated and webby as if someone had pulled a string cat's cradle as far as it would go. Its vertical columns climb visibly week by week; target dates are marked at each level, like the tracking of a child's growth against a wall.
Maidenhead bridge, designed in brick by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1839, has two middle arches spanning the river in great cheetah leaps. They were lower and broader than anything previously constructed in brick, and the Great Western Railway's directors feared the bridge would collapse: they insisted on the bridge's temporary timber supports remaining even after it opened. Annoyed, Brunel secretly lowered the supports a bit so they did not actually support anything.
Engineering is a world of tall things, long things, record-breakingly huge things and well-made things – but also things that elude our attention. I often travel through Paddington station, but usually early in the morning with my head low from dejection at finding no decent coffee, so I have never looked up with sufficient awe at the ironwork on the roof. In the plans, a 1914 iron-and-glass end-screen looks like a dome-shaped doodle, all exuberant sprays of ivy-like shoots. Zoom in, and admire the hundreds of tiny, precise thoughts that went into it, with notes of widths, lengths, fastenings, joints. Beauty takes hard-won human knowledge, and it takes clips and bolts.
It had already struck me recently how easy it is not to see. Last week I was led by Secret London, Rachel Howard and Bill Nash's 2011 book, to find the Boris Anrep mosaics on the floor of the National Gallery. As Howard and Nash point out, almost everyone hurries obliviously over these on their way to other art, and I had done the same. The mosaics feature Greta Garbo, Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf and others as muses and "modern virtues"; they are fun. They may be no oil painting – but how can anything so big be so invisible?
Is it a question of slowing one's pace, and gawping carefully at every little thing? Should we become flaneurs – the Parisian amblers famed for strolling all day through the arcades of 19th-century Paris – open to all sights and chance encounters?
But aimless drifting is not always enough. I have happily flaneured about in strange cities for hours, only to find out later that I missed seeing all the most interesting things. What I have seen I have probably misunderstood, or seen more dully for having no idea of how it came to be. I therefore sing the praises of those disregarded literary figures, the authors of guidebooks, archival catalogues and websites. Their reproductions and explications go with us on our travels, pointing out where things came from and why. They help us to experience the world as a profoundly humanised and engineered place – a place imbued with creativity and skill, and astonishingly rich in rivets.