Identity as Infrastructure

Exploring how design once held a nation together - and how it might again.

Lately I’ve been sketching, tinkering - having a play with the idea of what a British Rail 2.0 might look like.

It comes, perhaps inevitably, at a time when the government is proposing to resurrect British Rail - this time under the valiant title Great British Railways.

I’ll reserve judgement on the name, though if the early visuals are anything to go by… well, let’s hope they’re still in draft form.

Humour aside, the thought lingers: for all its flaws, British Rail represented one of the most coherent national design systems ever attempted.

Beneath the bureaucracy and the beige sandwiches was a quietly brilliant infrastructure of design - a language that united a nation in motion.

I’ve come to believe that’s what most people are nostalgic for - not the timetables or the tea, but the design.

That considered, beautifully rational visual order that made travel feel part of something larger and shared.

This project isn’t nostalgia; it’s curiosity. A small homage to the idea that design itself can be infrastructure - something that connects us, dignifies us, and holds the everyday together.

Standing at the Edge of Order

In the National Railway Museum, Mallard and Flying Scotsman sit like totems of another era - monuments to confidence and craft. They remind us that progress once had a look, a sound, a typeface.

The journey home told a different story: migraine lighting and tannoy fatigue. A system moving, but with no soul. A machine that works (ish), but meaning, utterly vanished. Somewhere along the line, we lost the poetry of travel.

So British Rail 2.0 became a way of asking: what would coherence feel like now?

Why It Matters

Rail isn’t just transport. It’s civic rhythm. It carries our families, our goods, our stories — from Cornwall to Caithness, from city concourse to coastal halt.

When it works, it binds us through shared experience. When it fragments, the nation feels smaller, meaner, less sure of itself.

Design has always been the invisible syntax of belonging.

Get it right, and even a platform sign can feel like home.

From Utility to Culture

If British Rail once gave shape to how the nation moved,

it also shaped how we felt about movement itself.

There was a quiet dignity in its order -

a sense that the network was held together by care as much as steel.

British Rail 2.0 plays with that idea —

imagining what a railway might look like

if coherence, beauty and belonging were once again considered essential.

A language that still knows how to speak,

if only someone would let it.

It becomes, in a sense, the soul of movement -

a living thread running through sound, ritual and material.

The departure chime drawn from landscape;

the warmth of light as the train glides from the platform;

the tactility of oak, wool, and brass restoring calm to the senses.

Travel as ceremony, not transaction.

Onboard, culture unfolds quietly -

journals in seat-backs, regional food served with grace,

music and language curated with the same care as engineering.

Each touchpoint part of a larger continuity,

a railway fluent in both precision and feeling.

And perhaps, in rediscovering that kind of care,

we might rediscover something of ourselves -

a sense of pride not shouted, but quietly lived;

the fleeting but profound relief of things making sense.

Because when a nation designs with conviction,

even a timetable can feel like poetry.

And when it doesn’t… well,

you end up with Great British Railways.