Is infrastructure ever exciting?
A trip to north London last week gave me time to have a good look around the HS2 works at Euston.
The biggest construction project in Europe feels calm, clean and well organised. Behind the scenes and underground, I'm sure that professionals from all parts of the railway, construction and engineering industries are working miracles to finally give the UK a national railway system fit for the 21st century.
So why does it all feel so - well, low profile? Why is it so hard to find any media coverage of the progress being made apart from in relation to the (fascinating) archaeological discoveries along the line?
And the same could be said of the other big infrastructure projects going on at the moment - the new Museum of London, the Thames Tideway sewer, or the Elizabeth Line. How can it be that huge investment projects like these, which will shape our country for the next century, are all just happening without public discussion?
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This really matters because of the importance of taxpayer funding in supporting infrastructure projects - whether in London or as part of the Levelling Up agenda. Infrastructure has the power to transform and to change places and peoples' opportunities in them. But we need to work harder to ensure that everybody remains engaged and aware of what public money is being spent on. And why the projects are worth doing.
If we can't achieve this then any project could be put at risk by the traditional British hostility to change and development.
We need to be much more conscious of the successes of the 2012 Olympics in selling our projects better. That means involving more voices than just that of the engineer, the transport professional and the planner. It means talking much more candidly, and with more imagination, about the benefits that these projects will bring and what it will mean for everybody who will benefit from them even if they don't know that yet.
In the meantime, all of us working in the world of infrastructure need to get better at explaining what we do - in language that everybody can understand.