Text 1: The river returns, by Mira Solanki
An original contemporary newspaper feature.
For most of last year, the centre of Langford looked as though someone had taken a bite out of it. Metal barriers narrowed the pavements, buses idled in temporary stops and, behind the fencing, machines worried at the concrete. The council called the work the Lyd Renewal Scheme. Most residents called it the hole.
The River Lyd had once crossed this part of town in the open. Sixty years ago, it was forced into a concrete channel and covered by a road. Now three hundred metres of that roof have been removed. The river has been brought back into daylight, with sloping banks, footpaths and broad stone steps leading down to the water.
On my first visit, there was little romance in it. Brown water crept between heaps of gravel, and the exposed channel resembled a wound that the town had not yet learned how to close. A clothes-shop owner, whose deliveries had been delayed for months, pointed towards the machinery. ‘They keep telling us what it will look like in ten years,’ she said. ‘My bills arrive now.’
Yet the project engineer, Nia Morgan, argued that the old road had separated the town from its river. ‘People crossed over it without knowing water was underneath them,’ she said. Her team had not attempted to make the Lyd perfectly straight. Instead, they had placed stones and bends in its course so that the water would move at different speeds. Even unfinished, the river had begun to alter how people used the space. Office workers ate lunch on the new steps, and children leaned over the railings to count the small fish holding themselves against the current.
I returned six months later, after several days of rain. The river was louder and wider, but it remained between its banks. Young trees, still tied to wooden supports, shook in the wind. There was litter caught against one grille and an abandoned shopping trolley lay on its side in the shallows. This was not the polished strip of blue shown in the council’s early pictures.
It was, however, alive in a way those pictures had not been. Water folded around the stones, carrying leaves beneath the footbridge. People had stopped at the railings simply to watch it. The shop owner told me that customers were returning, although she had not forgiven the lost months. ‘Ask me again in ten years,’ she said.
As evening came, the lit shop windows appeared in the moving water. The Lyd did not look like an old river restored or a new attraction completed. It looked provisional, untidy and stubbornly present: a loose silver thread with which the town might, in time, stitch itself together.
Text 2: The brook beneath Bell Street, by Arthur Wensley
An original newspaper article written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this article, written in 1876, a reporter describes the final stages of a scheme to cover a polluted town brook and build a street above it.
The open brook which has so long disgraced Bell Street will shortly trouble the eyes and noses of respectable citizens no more. For half a mile it has received the refuse of workshops and houses, carrying through the town a slow procession of broken boxes, vegetable peelings and substances best left unnamed. In warm weather, tradesmen have been obliged to keep their doors shut against it.
The Corporation has now enclosed the brook within a brick tunnel. A handsome new roadway is being laid above, wide enough for two carts to pass with ease. On Tuesday I descended into the works with Mr Hales, the engineer, who spoke with justifiable pride of the arch overhead. He struck the bricks with his cane and declared that they would carry the weight of Bell Street for a hundred years. Below us, the imprisoned water hurried through the darkness.
The works have attracted spectators from every quarter. Children watched each new section of arch advance, while householders calculated how much their properties might rise in value. Mrs Penketh, who keeps a bakery nearby, said that she looked forward to opening her windows. ‘It will be a street fit to live in,’ she told me, ‘instead of a ditch with houses beside it.’
Not everyone welcomes the improvement. An elderly basket-maker remembers catching minnows in the brook before the dye works were built. He maintains that the town has spoiled the water and is now punishing it for being spoiled. This is a pretty sentiment, though hardly a practical answer to the present nuisance. A growing town cannot be expected to arrange itself around a man’s childhood fishing place.
Nevertheless, on Thursday afternoon, when only a narrow strip of the brook remained uncovered, I saw a little girl place a leaf upon the water. She ran beside it until it reached the shadow of the new arch and vanished. The workmen then lowered the final stone. Their task was greeted with cheers, but the child continued to stare at the place where the water had been.
Bell Street opened on Saturday. Carts moved smoothly along it, shopkeepers displayed their goods in clean windows and no unpleasant smell disturbed the occasion. It is unquestionably a finer street than the muddy bank that preceded it. Yet, beside one iron grating, I could still hear the brook travelling under our feet. We have removed an offence from sight; whether we have removed it from the town is a question for those who come after us.
Both texts are about schemes which change waterways in towns.
Compare how far each writer presents the change as progress.
In your response, you should compare:
You must use the text to support your comments and make it clear which text you are referring to. Reach a judgement about how far each scheme is presented as an improvement.
110 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.4 Comparing texts, covering 2.4.1 Critical comparison of two or more texts. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.