I’ve set out to to answer this question for a couple reasons: first, to identify cases I didn’t know of and that I want to follow up on with archival research, oral histories, further reading, etc.; and second, to check whether the notion that futurology didn’t really happen in the UK (compared to the USA, Germany, and France, for example) is really valid.
My first motivation is practical - I want to make sure my project, a history of futurology in post-war UK science and technology policy, is covering all the relevant cases, and that means making sure I know of all these cases (in effect, this an exercise in turning “unknown unknowns” into “known unknowns”).
The second motivation addresses a broader priority of the project. The notion that futurology didn’t happen in the UK (at least, to the extent that it happened in other countries) has wider ties to narratives about the UK as a short-termist and/or nostalgic nation. Many historians, such as Lise Butler, Peter Bowler, and David Edgerton, have combatted these narratives by showing how pervasive were social and technological futures in popular and political culture. But when it comes to the practices of government itself, especially after the “disillusionment” that set in with economic planning at the end of the 1960s, I think there’s still much work to be done to interrogate the idea that British government is too short-termist.
So, I’ve spent the past couple months slowly surveying as many mentions of Britsih futures research as I can find. This has involved sifting back through archives and secondary sources that I’ve already seen, as well as going through some new literature, archival sources, and other primary sources. I won’t put a whole bibliography here, but two of the most useful sources I’ve found have been …and now the future: A P.E.P. Survey of Futures Studies (1971), written by Charles de Hoghton, with contributions from Guy Streatfeild1 and William Page2, for the London-based think tank Political and Economic Planning, and The Futures Directory, compiled by John and Magda McHale, with contributions from Guy Streatfeild and Laurence Tobias.
The good news is that I’ve found interesting, new instances of futurology that I didn’t know about, and also found that there was a huge amount of futurology going on in the UK through this period. I’m not going to give an exhaustive account of that here (I currently have a very messy 200-line spreadsheet that tabulates all the different instances I’ve found, which I can share upon request) and instead I’m going to go through some of the highlights that I found most interesting.
Futures universities
I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I’m particularly interested in the University of Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit, but I’ve uncovered a number of universities that had multiple departments and research units which were attributed as doing “futures research” in some guise. Here are the universities that stand out:
Strathclyde
I. F. Clarke, Professor of English Studies, translater of French science fiction, and all-around SF scholar, was a frequent author in the journal Futures from its inception in 1968.
The university’s Centre for Industrial Innovation featured in P.E.P.’s 1970 survey of futures research, and appears to have hosted a pan-European Technological Forecasting conference in June 1968.
ABACUS, the Architecture and Building Aids Computer Unit at the university’s Department of Architecture and Building Science, featured in the McHales’ Futures Directory in 1977.
Douglas Pitt and Simon Booth from Strathclyde’s Business School wrote an article on the “coming organisational revolution” for Futures in 1983.
I’m not surprised that Strathclyde came up - before it received its Royal Charter to become a university in 1964, it was the Royal College of Science and Technology, and so futurology’s crossovers with engineering and business strategy seem likely topics of research for Strathclyde’s staff.
Bradford
The University’s Management Centre (and later Business School), especially Brian Twiss, the director of the centre’s Group for Forecasting and Policy, come up in the Futures Directory and the Financial Times. This is the only explicit mention I can find, but I bring up Bradford because it was also home to a Peace Studies department, famously described by Margaret Thatcher as a “problem”. Peace studies also saw crossover with futures research (I think Kenneth and Elise Boulding were the most prominent examples of this crossover), and while I’m not sure if there was much dialogue between the university’s Peace Studies department and its Management Centre, maybe there were some wider conversations about futurology going on in Bradford in the 1970s.
Aston
A couple different projects came up at Aston. The first is the OSCAT programme, running c. 1967, which conducted technological forecasting on the steel industry, and which is mentioned in a letter to the Financial Times on 28 September 1967. The university’s Design and Innovation Group is mentioned in the P.E.P. Survey in 1970, while the Technology Policy Unit - chaired by technology assessment pioneer Ernest Braun and where David Collingridge wrote his influential book The Social Control of Technology - comes up during the 1970s and is briefly mentioned in The Futurist Directory, produced in 2000 by the World Future Society. Mihaela Smith at the Technology Policy Unit also wrote a very informative article about the Ministry of Technology and Atomic Energy Authority’s joint technological forecasting group, the Programmes Analysis Unit.
Manchester
Manchester comes up for two different, but seemingly connected, groups - the Department for Liberal Studies in Science, which existed from 1966 to 1983 and which is referred to in the McHales’ Futures Directory in 1977, and the research programme PREST (Policy Research in Engineering, Science and Technology) founded in 1977 and which was home to several figures publishing on futures studies, foresight, and innovation studies, including Ian Miles (formerly of SPRU), Luke Georghiou, and Denis Loveridge.
I find Manchester interesting because both these groups show STS and science policy research being help up as examples of futures research - which is the same reason that Sussex, because of Christopher Freeman’s Science Policy Research Unit, was seen as a centre of futures research during the 1970s. I think there’s probably much more to be said about the origins of STS, innovation studies, and science policy studies out of futures research during the 1970s - something I hope to write about during this project.
Edinburgh
Two research units get mentioned in the McHales’ Futures Directory: the Centre for Human Ecology and the Planning Research Unit. I haven’t found any evidence of connections between the two, so it might just be a couple isolated examples, but I thought Edinburgh was worth mentioning because of the science studies connection I talked about with Manchester, above.
Edinburgh also had a science studies unit, and while I haven’t found any evidence of connections between that unit and the futures researchers at the Centre for Human Ecology and the Planning Research Unit, there does seem to be a co-incidence of futures research and science studies at three universities across the UK (Sussex, Manchester, Edinburgh), which might be worth investigating further.
The rise of health futures
One area of futures research that pops up with increasing frequency from the 1970s onwards is health futures, particularly in the guise of “health technology assessment”, which I’m comfortable characterising as a variant of futures research because scholars both in the past (such as Brian Wynne) and present (such as Jenny Andersson and Anne-Greet Keizer) have highlighted the connections between technology assessment and futurology.
The first instance of health futures research in the UK I can find is the Office of Health Economics, founded by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry in 1962, and which published scenarios in 1969 about NHS spending in 1990. George Teeling-Smith of the Office of Health Economics later featured in 1977 in The Futures Directory. The year before, the Royal Commission on the NHS, chaired by Sir Alec Merrison, also had a seminar on futurology.
But health futures research really picks up from the mid-late 1980s. In 1987, the Department of Health and Social Security set up a health technology assessment group and the following year, 1988, the Medical Research Council conducted a Delphi exercise on health policy. In 1991, the NHS then set up an advisory group on health technology assessment.
1998 saw the first use that I can find of “horizon scanning” by a public agency in the UK, as the National Horizon Scanning Centre is established at the University of Birmingham to conduct health technology assessment research. The phrase, “horizon scanning”, is, however, older - the first futurological use I’ve found of “horizon scanning” is in hearings in the US Congress on the proposed 1975 National Science (and Technology) Policy and Organisation Act.
The next year, 1999, the Department of Health set up a Health Technology Assessment Commissioning Board - unclear whether this is connected to the national horizon scanning centre at Birmingham - and in 2000, Richard Walsh, head of the Department of Health’s Policy Management Unit, appeared in the World Future Society’s The Futurist Directory.
I do find it quite interesting how much health futures research there was in government - or funded by government - from the 1980s. It’s something I’d like to investigate further, especially as it seems to have popularised concepts, like “horizon scanning”, that are now commonplace in UK government futures research. My purely speculative explanation for this trend is based on David Edgerton’s argument that the British welfare state doesn’t really emerge from shadow of the “warfare state” until 1970. So I wonder if perhaps this focus on health futures from the 1970s and 1980s reflects the strengthening of the welfare state in this time period (rather than conventional narratives of its hollowing out through the cash-strapped 1970s and under Thatcher in the 1980s).
The absence of defence futures
One area of futures research that is very clearly missing from these searches of public sources and surveys is defence futurology. I don’t believe that’s because it didn’t exist - the early Cold War defence policy origins of futurology are well-established - so I’m convinced that the Ministry of Defence did futurology and that it wasn’t, for obvious reasons, made very public. The only explicit mention I’ve found is a 1966 article, ‘Eggheads to help plan defence policy’, in the Daily Mail by Angus MacPherson, the newspaper’s defence correspondent, about the formation of a new “long-range planning and research unit” in the Ministry of Defence. It’s something I’d like to look into further - the Defence Operational Analysis Establishment seems like a good place to start looking, as well as the Ministry of Defence’s “Project Foresight” future battlefield studies of the 1980s. Right now, I’m not sure to what extent defence futurology would have been siloed off from the futures activities going on in science, technology, energy, and health policy from the 1970s to the 1990s, or if there actually would have been some cross-fertilisation. More to follow, I suspect.
Next Steps
From all the instances I can find of futures research and futurology in post-war Britain, I’ve identified the different cases I want to take further and do some deeper digging in the literature and scope out the feasibility of archival research and/or oral histories for these topics. I think the broad chronological arc is going to look something like this:
Early varied interests in futurology in the late 1960s: Michael Young; Dennis Gabor; Jeremy Bray at the Ministry of Technology; efforts to bring the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis to London.
Institutionalisation in the 1970s: the Programmes Analysis Unit at MinTech and the Atomic Energy Authority; the creation of the Committee on Future World Trends in the Cabinet Office (both focussing in particular on energy issues and technological forecasting); and, in parallel, the Social and Technological Alternatives for the Future project at Sussex, which fed back into various government conversations through the 1970s.
De-institutionalisation in the late 1970s and early 1980s: the closure of the Programmes Analysis Unit in 1977; the closure of the Committee on Future World Trends in 1981 (already after a few years of inactivity); the rejection of Ben Martin and John Irvine’s “Foresight” proposal for science policy planning in the early 1980s.
Fragmented approaches through the 1980s: Advisory Council on Applied R&D in the Cabinet Office inherit staff from the Programmes Analysis Unit; continued research on Foresight at Sussex and Manchester’s PREST research group; information technology futures and marine technology foresight in the Department of Trade and Industry; creation of the Science and Technology Assessment Office in 1986 in the Cabinet; health technology assessment takes off.
Re-institutionalisation in the 1990s: the Technology Foresight Programme in the Goverment Office of Science and Technology (1993); creation of the National Horizon Scanning Centre in Birmingham (1998); creation of the Strategic Futures Team in the Policy Performance and Innovation Unit in the Cabinet Office (2000).
I’m hoping over the next couple months to write a series of shorter posts that profile some of these research topics, pinpointing the literature and sources that can help me dive deeper, before finalising all the topics that I’m going to look at in the archives (which reminds me - I’ll be the John Antcliffe Archival By-Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge in the upcoming Michaelmas term, so I’ll be in the UK for most of the autumn, if anyone wants to get in touch while I’m there). Until next time, and thanks for reading.
I think I’ve mentioned Streatfeild in a previous post, but he’s an interesting character who I’d like to follow up on more. He was the editor of the journal Futures, which I believe he ran at first out of his home in Guildford, Surrey, and then moved during the 1970s to the USA.
Uncovering William Page’s history was also a nice confirmation of my previous and existing lines of inquiry, as I found that he’d worked at both the Science Policy Research Unit, Sussex, and in the British Post Office’s telecom division. I think the former is going to be quite important for this project, while I’ve already written at length about futurology in the latter.