Nicholas Russell

I used to be an academic but I’ve almost recovered. Not completely, the ghosts of old employments linger, especially the conditioned reflex of enthusing about obscure knowledge. I hope that if I tell stories about such stuff well enough, people might be tempted to read the books I’d like to write.

One thing I want to do is re-evaluate working life. The literary response to work tends to be satirical or to describe how characters react against it. There are not many stories showing how relationships at work can have the same impact as romantic, personal or family interactions. I tried to write short fiction exploring such work relations. Most of it remains unpublished.

If fiction and working life do not mix, what about non-fiction? Documentaries set in workplaces used to be a staple infill around feature films in the cinema. They have been replaced by television programmes about work, ranging from medicine and the fight against crime to visits to factories churning out all manner of products. Most are about the nuts and bolts of work, not relationships. So perhaps describing practical life in the workplace could make good reading, especially if innovations that happen there lead to new ways of life.

I have put together two such stories, both set in the decades before and after the Second World War. In Household Names I wrote a combined memoir/history of Russell Hobbs and the innovation that made them household names, the kettle that never boiled over. That sounds trivial but uncontrolled kettles were dangerous and how they were brought under control is a microcosm of successful product innovation. That process needs innovators and appropriate economic and social conditions. There will always be people wanting to innovate but the external conditions for success have largely disappeared in the UK over the last half-century.

Lubetkin and Goldfinger explores the work of these two émigré architects in the design of council housing in the decade before the Second World War, when substantial public sector accommodation was planned, onto the decades afterwards when council house building accelerated. Like innovation-driven manufacturing, the supply of council housing in the UK was largely shut off nearly fifty years ago. The two phenomena are connected, the loss of well-paid industrial jobs created poverty and dysfunction, allowing crime and deprivation to spread across council estates. This turned them from sub-utopias into places where no one wanted to live.

I have a dream that the history of automatic kettles and council housing might eventually become required reading! I think they are good stories that deserve to be told. The old enthusing gene never goes away and I’d like to write a few more tales. So watch this space.

Visit my website to find out more.

https://nicholasrussell.org/