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

This research will evaluate the protracted closure of the Varsity Line against contemporary political and intellectual
cultures 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 for
population increase and economic expansion will reveal a growing modernist culture that valued social, economic and
environmental concerns in the face of the individualist consumer-driven culture of the car and road building which the
government invested in increasingly. The opposing views of individual liberty framing the railways as a bygone
technology versus a social transport system capable of preventing congestion and environmental decay, will thus inform
the debates over affluence, decline and modernisation. It will also evaluate the extent to which Britain's political and
intellectual perception of this period was distinct from or shaped by the same dynamics in Europe and the US. The public
discourse surrounding what the historiography identifies as one of the most controversial and mistaken closures of the
Beeching era, will provide evidence for the very recent scholarship placing the railways within the culture of decline
rather than a narrow issue of transport policy.