Joshua Green

JERUSALEM

A December 2012 Telegraph headline announced that Fracking (the procedure of extracting onshore shale gas) could ‘permanently affect 60% of the British countryside, despite safety fears’.

From the present day through to 2025, energy requirements throughout the entire world grow exponentially, while civil unrest resonates deeper and deeper into oil-rich countries. Faced with the unavoidable necessity for a self-sufficient energy industry, the UK turns to the fledgling onshore gas industry of British Shale (FTSE:BS); helping brand UK nuclear as ‘unsustainably privatised’ and traditional renewables as subsidised ‘money pits’.

Exceeding all expectations, fracking test sites prove that national shale reserves are above and beyond what had been previously imagined. As such, rapidly expanding communities surrounding the multiplying drill sites are supported by international energy investors, creating boom ‘megalopoli’ throughout the UK. Glasgow, Swansea and Blackpool prosper as economic trade centres within their localised gas reserves; in the south of the country, Croydon sits at the tip of the ‘Gatwick Diamond’; a highly evolved BID at the centre of London-Brighton’s massive gas fields. Expanding exponentially and under constant public and governmental scrutiny, these megalopoli resort to extreme measures to establish their reputation as the ‘backbone’ of a new British industrialism. Through playing upon the general public's fracking fears by creating well-funded 'canary in the cage' infrastructures, British Shale ensures the ‘greenwashed’ survival of their ‘too big to fail’ megalopolis; the blueprint for a new British ‘suburbiside’ vernacular: Jerusalem.