In the middle of the twentieth century many villages in rural Derbyshire were in possession of an automatic telephone exchange.
As a child, a holiday treat for me was to accompany my father on his visits of inspection to these exchanges. They looked like small bungalows, built out of local stone, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding cottages except for their lack of windows or gardens.
I can still remember the mysterious click, clack clack of the connections being made by the banks of levers, knobs & switches - is it my imagination, or were they made of wood?. The romance of imagining all those human connections being made without the need for human intervention ... But how clunky it all seems now, when at the touch of a button on a lap top I can be connected with the other side of the world.
What happened to those exchanges? Have they been demolished? Converted into des res? Do they now house vital bits of the World Wide Web? Or do they just stand as empty echoes of the ghostly clacks of those postwar rural conversations?
