Relics of acceleration: a field guide

Scale, mass, solidity and haunting bulk are factors that are unavoidable when thinking about twentieth-century military and experimental scientific structures. Whether sites of state science or defence, they have many aspects in common: secrecy, a cultivated sense of unknowability and a paradoxical relation between intangibility of subject and solidity of structure. This chapter reflects on some of these places as key sites in the modern history of speed in the UK. Acceleration takes on different guises in each. The specific historical contingency of these sites also leaves space for re-imaginings and alternative possibilities to be considered without the pessimistic inevitability that a focus on contemporary military futurism would yield.