THREADS

This weekend I discovered the Barry Hines movie THREADS.  I found it compelling.  It is set in my hometown, Sheffield, back in the eighties - almost a vanished era for the young I guess.  And it features the Town Hall extension that my father, an architect designed! We see the building functioning as ordinary life goes on, while the political situation as reported on The News is worsening. We see the local civil servants who will be in control if a nuclear war breaks out gather there.

And then we see it blown up when Sheffield is nuked.

It made me feel sad in many different ways.  Threads shows us the people of Sheffield going about their business as the political situation darkens and puts an end to all their hopes and plans - people I knew and worked with - people like me.

And, ironically, the extension - a lovely building - was effectively nuked by the politics of the time. It was planned and designed when local government was expanding.  The Town Hall even financed a Peace Movement then that was going to keep Sheffield safe from being nuked by making it into a Nuclear Free Zone (?).  And there was a Left Wing Bookshop, I remember, which I think it also financed.  It re-booted itself as The Independent Bookshop before it disappeared as mysteriously as the Marie Celeste.  It was closed one day - pretty much with half drunk cups of tea still on the counter.  Which I presume marked the moment that the Council could no longer fund it.

As I remember it, the Peace Movement itself was so riven with division that if one factor could have nuked the other it probably would.  Anyway, politics was changing, local government was being shrunk, not expanded.  And by the time the Town Hall extension was built, it was no longer needed.

So, in time it was emptied and demolished, along with daddy's lovely Registry Office, where Penny and George were married.  It was round, and known locally as "The Wedding Cake".  The Winter Gardens that replaced it are nice, and well-used. But unfortunately the buildings that replaced it were the standard tall glass and steel boxes.

Whereas the lost extension had a pleasant roundness about it - a softness. Someone once described it as "the box which the Wedding Cake came in".  Not just a featureless box in other words.

Anyway my father is in the centre of the picture above, with all the young architects of the 1950's making a valiant effort to build a brave new world from the bombsites and rubble of World War 2.  I recognise Don, and John, and Aziz - all iconic names from my childhood.

It was a sincere effort, after the horrors of two world wars, but of course they were up against the forces of "the world", which are set on destruction.

And as the Inspired Scriptures so rightly warn: "It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step."  We cannot put right what has gone so wrong no matter how much we long to.

But when God's Kingdom is ruling over the earth, will those sincere and enthusiastic young architects in the photo be woken from the dreamless sleep of death, and under the loving and flawless direction of the heavenly government, will they be able to have a part in building the paradise they so much wanted to build back then?

I hope so. Very much.  Think of how lovely some of our older cities are - cities like Rome and Venice for example - built at a time when the human family was closer to its perfect start than it is now.

How much lovelier will the cities in the paradise earth be?