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All sorts of distances are shrinking in Britain, and the Internet is a big reason. On a tidy farm near York I met Beryl Otley, cheery and fast-talking, who responded to the terrible slump in agriculture by starting a cooperative of farmers' wives who sell fancy hats in person and over the Internet at www.getaheadhats.co.uk. They are in constant touch by e-mail and attract customers from around the country. Business, she says, "has been great."
The Isles of Lewis and Harris used to be among the remotest places you could find, in the Atlantic 260 km northwest of Glasgow, home to peat bogs and more sheep than people, their economies devoted to fish and handwoven Harris tweed. I flew there from Glasgow. Now typists sitting in remote farms download voice files of dictation from London lawyers and send back text files in two hours ready for printing. The weavers of Harris tweed, that most traditional of Scottish products, have an Internet store and stay in touch by e-mail with the marketeers who now have them making funky pastels for London couture houses.
A Scottish telecoms company, iomart, opened a call center in Stornoway two years ago that has expanded to 85 employees. They maintain webpages for businesses and take phone queries from subscribers to their Internet portal, www.madasafish.com, as easily as if they were in London. Easier, in fact: average education levels on Lewis are high, and "if we had this facility in London, the churn rate of staff would be 20% a month," says managing director Angus MacSween. He counts staff departures on one hand.
Distances are shrinking for Brits in other ways, too. No matter how fraught London's relations with Brussels, cheap flights and the Channel Tunnel are ineluctably blurring the mental divide from the Continent. U.K. residents made 43 million visits to Western Europe last year, double the level a decade ago. Stephen Wright, who runs an antipoverty agency near Glasgow, told me he was thinking of flying to Dublin and back for a night's pub crawl, because a $45 Ryanair round trip fare "would be cheaper than taking a taxi 20 km to Glasgow and back."
It's also striking how car culture has taken hold all over the country: near every major city I saw splashy malls just like those in the U.S., offering identical stores and movies and chain restaurants, sucking in people by the thousands not just for shopping but for entertainment. Of course, mall culture is mass-market, but it's not as bland as the bangers-and-mash Britain I once knew. At the sprawling new Asda-WalMart store outside Bristol, where there was a half-hour wait from motorway to parking lot, the food bargain of the day was a multi-course Mexican meal for two plus a six-pack of beer for $8.60. The free sample by the door was Uncle Ben's rogan josh.
At Star City in Birmingham, a huge mall built on a brownfield site near the famous Spaghetti Junction, the Italian restaurant was full. So was a gargantuan tapas bar. Its cinema is Britain's largest, with 30 screens. Two are devoted to movies in Hindi, to tap the large local population of Indian descent — though unlike the Hollywood movies that are heavily promoted, the Bollywood films don't get a single poster.
Curiously, even the government seems to be tapping the values of entertainment and mall culture for schemes of social improvement. Take unemployment in Birmingham, which lost more jobs in the 1980s than Scotland and Wales together, as automobiles and other metal-bashing industries collapsed. The city "used to have a great technological base, but now I think it's lost its way," says Peter Rigby, the founder of Specialist Computer Holdings, a 5,000-employee information technology company based there.
What's the answer? Just outside the business district, a $180 million complex called Millennium Point is being built with money from the city, the E.U., private developers and the national lottery. It will have shops, a big-screen cinema, a hands-on technology museum, after-school programs for kids and the transplanted technology faculty of the University of Central England. Over time, the organizers hope it will reinvigorate the neighborhood as well as provide a hub for the study and exploitation of new technologies. It's a good idea, but is it enough? Rigby, who chairs the project's board, worries that Birmingham also needs to come up with a comprehensive development plan and offer incentives to companies looking to relocate.
That wasn't the only gap I encountered on my trip between glaring need and government's willingness to pay. I couldn't take trains because much of Britain's network was shut down as managers struggled furiously to cope with broken rails, the result of inadequate investment by both government and industry. I had to avoid many regions being devastated by flooding; inadequate central planning and funding were partly to blame. The Britain of 1950 was much grayer and blander than the Britain of 2000, to be sure. But its earnest government cleared slums and nationalized whole industries and created a health service, because it had the courage of its outsized convictions. Even in a free-market, networked world where John Bull has a taste for rogan josh, government must still be able to ensure the trains run on time.
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Open All Hours
Britain has put World War II and boiled cabbage behind it at last as prosperity and the party spirit reaches remote Scottish islands
Photo Gallery
Check out the photos from this leg of TIME's Fast Forward Europe voyage
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The British are having fun with their history
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A once-thriving Scottish town is finding ways and means to get people back to work and sell kilts online
Exodus Reversed
Prosperous Ireland is importing workers for a change — it's short of hands to milk cows and make computers
How to Get Noticed
Turner Prize nominee Simon Patterson on the British art scene
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Tower of Babble
British comedian Eddie Izzard talks with TIME's Chris Thornton
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