The new concourse at King’s Cross station opens tomorrow and Rowan Moore has a piece  welcoming it in the Observer. He pays tribute to the wondrous steel arch designed by John McAslan and Partners and built by the UK’s secret success story Arup but he criticizes the overall landscaping of the area and the way the new dome relates to the old classic industrial trainshed. I think he’s wrong on both counts. King’s Cross is classic London brick 19th century industrial building and the steel arch dome gives the whole another 100 years or so of life.

As for the whole site: the King’s Cross development: it is an exciting piece of landscaping, the only flaw being the inexplicable retention of ugly, gaunt tenements between St Pancras and Kings Cross, derelict and scaffolded for 10 years now. They should have been demolished. But with the landscaping of the canal, the new square between the canal and the London College of the Arts, and much more, this is the most exciting urban development in Britain today.

The sperm whale and the gain squid engage in titanic struggles in the deep of the Southern Oceans. No one has ever seen the fight and few people have ever seen a giant squid, but sperm whales’ stomachs contain a high proportion of giant squid remains and they are often badly scarred and scuffed by their tentacles.

This arms race in the deep fascinated me 25 years ago when I first heard about it. I was working on natural history reference books when an artist colleague drew my attention to the strange pencil thin lower jaw of the whale beneath its monster head. Didn’t that jaw look a little like a squid tentacle? This was the beginning of my fascination with mimicry and I surmised that the encounter began when a squid mistook the jaw looming into view for another squid. I published a short article on it in the Forum section of New Scientist, now available, like most of their back issues, online. I also made it into Heathcoat Williams’ book Whale Nation.


No evidence for or against has emerged since until this week, when a BBC natural history piece on their website reported that “The world's biggest squid species have developed huge eyes to give early warning of approaching sperm whales”. The eyes can measure up to 11 in across.

There is little light at these depths which is why the squid might see the row glint of teeth (suckers?) on the jaw but not the huge bulbous head of there sperm. Sperm whales have echolocation to spot squid but the squid only have eyes. The squid need acute vision to see the whole sperm and act accordingly.

To confirm this theory, encounters between squid and sperm whales would need to be filmed and I don’t expect my theory to be confirmed any time soon, but it’s good to have a pet theory that stays more or less alive.

Sarah Bakewell’s piece in the Guardian reminded me of the most interesting but sadly underrated book I’ve read in the last 10 years: Brian Hayes’ Infrastructure (W W Norton). Hayes reveals a world that is ours but is almost unknown: that is, the infrastructure that sustains us: agriculture, manufacture, energy, transport, communications. In brilliantly incisive and stylish fashion he demonstrates and explains the ingenuity that keeps us fed, clothed, warm and able to move around safely and talk to each other across the globe.

The fascination lies in the intellectual pleasure and witty fun involved in some of the technologies. He decodes the landscape, telling us why mobile (cell phone) phone masts have three sides; why railway lines are bedded on crushed stone rather than solid concrete; how to spot internet peering points, hidden within windowless block buildings. He also shows how technology can sometimes fail: the ruins of Teton dam in Idaho resemble a Pharaonic pyramid and of course there is Galloping Gerty, the Tacoma Narrows bridge that shook itself to piece in 1940.

Hayes’ examples are mostly from the USA but that’s no penalty – the USA’s industrial infrastructure is magnificent. Or rather it used to be. A sadness creeps is when, in the captions to his brilliant photographs (which he took), we read that these power stations, steelworks, petrochemicals plants have changed hands several times recently, passed on in grubby deals, to be sweated and run into the ground. Obama came to power on a ticket to renew America’s infrastructure: its crumbling bridges and highways. In Hayes book it still looks magnificent, but for how long?