This is my Dad. In this photo, he’s 34, on the way to an Arsenal vs Chelsea FA Cup tie in January 1947. The match ended in a draw.
I found this photo at Christmas 2017, and the first match I went to afterwards was a few days later. It was also in January, also against Chelsea, and ended 2-2. I was 35.
‘The world is changing faster than ever’, scream the headlines of nearly every article you read on the internet now. As well as being entirely unprovable (and focussed on the WEIRD world), it’s very unhelpful. Because when you’re planning for the future, it’s just as important to look backwards as it is to look forwards.
For example, this is Shaftesbury Avenue in London, sixty years apart. I reckon if an alien came down to land and saw these two images, it would say they’re pretty identical.
As they probably would about these two images of Baker St underground station. (In fact, many people who regularly travel on the Central Line would probably say it still feels like the 1860s.)
How about those electric scooters, tormenting pedestrians and motorists alike all over London? Go back 100 years, and you’ll find they were popular with the suffragettes and the mobs in New York, handy for escaping from the police down small alleyways.
Sticking with how we get around, Electric vehicles, now growing in popularity to avert climate change catastrophe. The first prototypes emerged in the 1830s, the first practical vehicles in 1890 - eighteen years before Ford’s Model T.
The BIC pen has famously stayed the same for over fifty years (albeit with the addition of a choking-prevention hole in the top)
And Deliveroo? Uber Eats? Tesco Whoosh? Sainsbury’s were 100 years ahead of them all, with a bike-based food delivery service in Enfield as early as 1910.
When it comes to our social lives, we’ve always loved wine. This is a jar recovered from a Neolithic site in Georgia. Researchers found wine residue on pottery shards at two Georgian sites going back to 6,000 B.C
And wherever you have customers, you have complaints. This customer - Nanni - was pretty unhappy with the copper he’d received from Ea-nāṣir:
“What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? It is now up to you to restore my money to me in full.
Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality... and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.”
Now, this isn’t to say that everything stays the same. Because clearly, lots of things change, in both small and big ways. But the trick - rather than just saying ‘EVERYTHING IS CHANGING SO FAST!!!’ - is to work out precisely what is changing - significantly, fundamentally - and when.
After all, as William Gibson said,
‘The future is already here –it’s just not evenly distributed’
McKinsey describes this as finding the tipping point, the moment when something goes from being on the fringe to being mainstream
The brilliant Stuart Brand goes further with his ‘Pace Layering’ idea, that you need to understand the differing speeds at which categories change. Fashion is changing constantly. Culture, not so much.
(Incidentally, this is where we can see how the rapid change in nature upsets the balance)
So whilst Shaftesbury Avenue didn’t change much between 1950 and 2010, it had changed quite significantly from fifty years before that.
There’s a clear tipping point to be seen in entertainment, with the rapid rise of television ownership between 1948 and 1958
Our perceptions of safety, and therefore the time we and our children spend roaming outdoors, has dramatically reduced, as we’ve become more exposed to the news
And thankfully, we’re seeing a big shift in (some) societal attitudes to gender equality. I still find it remarkable that this campaign for Yorkie ran until 2012. 2012!
Back to my beloved Arsenal, in 1930 when they won their first FA Cup, they celebrated with a crowd of thousands - including my Dad - on an open-top bus, congregating outside Islington Town Hall. Seventy years later, it was my turn, as Arsenal celebrated winning the league title for the thirteenth time.
Hopefully soon, it’ll be my boys’ turn to celebrate like their Dad and Grandad did.
But in the meantime, we’ll just keep playing Lego together, finding new ways to mix together the old pieces that have always been the same.
Which, when you think about it, is what creativity really is.
If you like this kind of thing, you’ll love ’s Substack, on the things that you think are changing, but are actually staying the same.