It wasn’t easy getting to Culham — there is no direct service from London. Instead, a train from Paddington takes you to Didcot, where you can catch an hourly, two-car diesel service to the village.
As the train gently chugged into Culham station, belching fumes, I looked around to see a ticket office, a row of dilapidated houses and a small cafe. The rest was fields. The ticket office was shut — along with the adjacent red brick platform, it had been sold off and was now used as a print works, with a new concrete platform hastily erected alongside it — and the cafe didn’t open till 2pm. It was deserted.
It did not feel like the most auspicious surroundings for a place that had just become the centrepiece of the government’s new AI Opportunities Action Plan, a fifty-point vision to make the UK one of the leading global centres for the advance of artificial intelligence. The Plan proposed the creation of “AI Growth Zones”, clusters of AI expertise in which the normal planning rules would be suspended to build things quicker and cheaper. The only growth zone identified in the plan was Culham….
