The official name for London's Olympic tower – there are already several unofficial ones – is the ArcelorMittal Orbit. Boris Johnson had some fun fumbling with the name when he unveiled Anish Kapoor's design this week, but let's try to deconstruct it; it may tell us something about the world's modern history. Arcelor first. The first two letters come from Arbed, a Luxembourg steel company (Acieries Reunies Burbach-Esch-Dudelange) formed in 1911 from three smaller companies with origins in the late 19th century. The next three letters, c, e and l, are taken from Aceralia, a Spanish steel company which grew out of another early 20th-century amalgamation, this time of three blast furnace businesses in Bilbao. A hundred years ago it was Spain's biggest company; its later career is complicated by many takeovers and reorganisations and its acronym less easily explained than Arbed's, but by the year 2000 it was its country's leading steelmaker. The 'or' is from Usinor, the French steelmaker formed in 1948 by a merger of two old companies (the important one, acronym-wise, is Les Forges et Aciéries du Nord et de l'Est). In 2001, Arbed, Aceralia and Usinor came together to form the pan-European Arcelor. In the old days, given some imagination, it had been possible to see a place and a factory behind a company title – a drift of furnace smoke, say, over Dudelage in Luxembourg or heaps of iron ore near Bilbao – but now the association between an industry and the place it inhabited became almost invisible. |
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