Modernisation and the Closure of the Varsity Line, 1964-1974

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This research will evaluate the protracted closure of the Varsity Line against contemporary political and intellectualcultures as the pressure of economic and social transformation forced government retrenchment of Britain's railways.The sources used will be, on the one hand, government and British Rail papers rationalising the need for closures,against local objections, which contain an opposing vision of modernisation to retrenchment. Local authority plans forpopulation increase and economic expansion will reveal a growing modernist culture that valued social, economic andenvironmental concerns in the face of the individualist consumer-driven culture of the car and road building which thegovernment invested in increasingly. The opposing views of individual liberty framing the railways as a bygonetechnology versus a social transport system capable of preventing congestion and environmental decay, will thus informthe debates over affluence, decline and modernisation. It will also evaluate the extent to which Britain's political andintellectual perception of this period was distinct from or shaped by the same dynamics in Europe and the US. The publicdiscourse surrounding what the historiography identifies as one of the most controversial and mistaken closures of theBeeching era, will provide evidence for the very recent scholarship placing the railways within the culture of declinerather than a narrow issue of transport policy.