The Cold Warrior telescope of Cheshire.
I spent £190 getting to and from Jodrell Bank to see the Lovell telescope today and it was worth it.
I’m writing this from ‘the Crewe Hero’ — half pub, half waiting room — on platform 5 of Crewe station.
My excessive outgoings are entirely my own fault, a symptom of missing my booked train — twice — both on the way out from Euston and the way back.
My original error was very kindly solved by Howard, the stammering, generous host of today’s Twentieth Century Society North West Region’s event, who organised for Steve, the chipper minivan driver, to head back and pick me up.
The first glimpses of the whiter than white skeleton through the trees was quite something. Eiffel tower, constructivism, industrial revolution — all connotations swirling in my head.
A fellow society member, presumably a local, murmured it looked best like this, from afar, so you can understand the scale. But now I’m tucked up in the ‘Hero’ and I reflect back, I must disagree.
Lines, curves, angles, trigonometry, brilliant against the blue sky. The main dish, almost sensual with its heavy curve. No, this is better close up.
I tried to imagine what must it have been like to hear Bernard Lovell explain his plans for the first time. A WW2 radar expert, he first came to this area in the late 1940s to get away from the interference of the big city. There, on the quiet Cheshire site, he used a whole host of co-opted ex military equipment in his initial, hobby-ish experiments. That’s how he hit on the big idea to build the huge moveable radio telescope — the biggest in the world — that would become his namesake.
Before anything like this has been done before, before people were even sure it would really work, it must have been quite a thing to persuade the powers that be to open the public purse.
But persuade he did. And, proving little changes ultimately in space and time, it promptly went massively over budget. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Cold War geopolitics, it might have been considered a costly mistake.
However, in 1957 Sputnik happened. Jodrell bank’s ‘Mark 1’ telescope (as it was then known) had come online just months before, and was the only instrument in the world capable of tracking the Russian probe. Doing so was its first act.
Overnight a potential embarrassment became a politician’s best friend. With the fears of Cold War wipeout seemingly very real — Sputnik itself was made from recycled nuclear warhead — the value of Lovell’s labour of love seemed clear to even the worst astrophysics philistine. Indeed, the Lovell telescope would go on to intercept another Russian satellite’s first ever pictures of the Moon’s surface (promptly leaked to the British press before the Russia’s). It would even prove useful during the Cuban Missile Crisis, directing itself at the USSR to detect a nuclear strike.
Of course none of this I knew this morning, back when I was cursing myself for not setting my alarm. No, this was relayed to us from the real hero of our trip: our tour guide, a charming young PhD student from the University of Manchester, so passionate about the subject area he made a planned 30minute tour last 1hr, for which we were all the better. Naturally, it wasn’t the geopolitics he was most excited about, but the instrumental part Jodrell played, and plays, in the study of pulsars and quasars.
His skill in making complicated astrophysics comprehensible is evidenced by the rapture our whole troop of modernist architecture buffs fell into listening to him. But I suppose, when you’re discussing being able to hear the very first light in the universe, still travelling the wave on which it escaped the Big Bang, it’s enough for anyone to pause for thought, regardless of your academic discipline.
And I must say, he certainly caught the mood of the group when he went on an unscripted monologue delivering a feminist critique of the astrophysics industry. As this point I could have hugged him. Perhaps mistakenly, I refrained.
Although we were given a run down of the observatory’s impressive CV, Jodrell’s best days may even yet be ahead of it. Refurbished in 2002, it attracts talented students and researchers from all over, remains the third biggest telescope in the world of its sort, and will be the world HQ of a bold new project — the SKA, or Square Kilometer Array. Opening in 2024, this will be a continent sized network of thousands of radio telescopes, stationed in South Africa and Australia, capable of unprecedented accuracy. Cheshire is on the (astrophysics) map to stay.
And so as I sit here with a £190 shaped hope in my pocket, I think back to the moment the sun finally came out, making the white whiter, and the dark shades cast by crisscrossing structural support darker, and I smile.
Worth. Every. Penny.
Right, time for another half a Guinness.
