Into the Abyss

I am furious. Really, really spitting with rage. I have been this way for some time, since those lunatics running the asylum have managed to smash the economy into tiny bits in order to feed the monster that is the financial services 'industry'. My own beloved industry actually produces something useful rather than convoluted balance sheets and dodgy investment vehicles, but the government does not see fit to pump billions of my money and yours into it to stop it falling flat on its face.

Of course, I have been through all this before, and the sheer inevitability of it all is particulary galling. First, there is a government inspired financial disaster, which results in the sources of money drying up. As you all know, building something cost a lot of money, and it is very rare indeed to find anyone, private or corporate, who can just dip into their pockets to fund such a project. The money has to be borrowed, granted or cashed in from selling something else. Last time, it was the high interest rates that stuffed us all. This time it is the fecklessness of the nits in the City, and the limp wristed regulation perpetrated by the lawyers and bean counters running the country. The end result is the same - no money for you and me.

From no money comes no construction. Big projects are mothballed half way through as the finance dries up. Small projects never get out of the ground. Big architectural practices, who have whole teams of architects, technologists and admin staff suddenly find their people have nothing to do. After desperate attempts to breathe life into stalling projects, and cutting fees to the bone, they have no choice but to sack 30, 50 or more.

The small practioner has one project which does not go ahead and has to go to the bank to help with cashflow. Although of course the bank is no longer lending, not to the little people, anyway.

Other consultants also rely on the construction industry, such as engineers, mechanical consultants, bat specialists, landscape architects and those bods who calculate carbon emissions. None of these are getting enquiries either.

The contractors are no longer getting tenders to price. The sub contractors, electricians, plumbers, painters, heating engineers, do not get asked by the contractors for prices for packages of work. Hundreds, thousands of skilled tradesmen are thrown out of their jobs.

Desperate, and knowing only one industry, many buy vans with their redundancy pay and scratch a living doing jobbing work. Architects and technologists set up their own practices, tiny little one man bands, operating from the spare room or a corner of the living room. They make a living from loo extensions and tiny little alterations. The profession fractures into a thousand small peices.

Many skilled tradesmen move into other sectors, their skills lost to an ancient and noble industry on its knees. Come the time things improve, many tradesmen decide not to go back to the long hours and the possibility of yet another crash. Quality suffers as there are no longer enough skilled people to carry out conservation work or high quality new build.

As for those little practices, they tend to stay little, realising that the only way to survive is to stay independent with as few overheads and responsibilities as possible. Just like Alice. We are the ones referred to as 'bottom feeders' by our own RIBA Director of Practice not so long ago. Nice. Charming attitude towards those who pay his salary. Of course, he knows not what he says as he is not at the coal face of the industry as we are, but sits in a nice, protected, well paid cocoon - rather like those bankers who started it all.

Could they be related?