Pandaemonium: the book that inspired Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony We started work on the Opening Ceremony by plastering the walls of a little office in Soho with images and quotations. Jesse Owens, William Blake, Shakespeare, Tim Berners-Lee and this one from GK Chesterton, which has been my own motto for years. I'm a children's writer. I believe my job is not to dazzle with new wonders, but to scrub off the patina of familiarity so that my readers can see again how dazzling things already are. Pandæmonium did this job for me. I grew up in a small Merseyside town called Rainhill. It seemed like a dull commuter sprawl for factory workers - Fords, Beechams, Pilkingtons, BICC. Across the back fields were the slag heaps of Sutton Manor Colliery. In Pandæmonium, Rainhill appears as the scene of earth-shattering events and a shocking moment of violence. Those factories reverberate to the sound of a new age being moulded and hammered. In school I had read endless poems and novels lamenting the passing of rural England. Poets were telling me I'd already missed the best of England. Pandæmonium was the first time I'd read anything that caught the excitement, the unpredictability, the power of the landscape I grew up in. And of course that too has gone like the greenwood. I can be nostalgic for the sight of factory gates opening and workers pouring out, for pit wheel and the siren, for riding down the bright blue mud slides on Sutton Manor slag heap on a tin tray, for splashing through its pools of rainbow coloured water, just as Hardy was nostalgic for the ploughboy. As Danny puts it, "at first these may not look like our times but Jennings makes clear these are our recent footprints." The more personally you speak, the more universally you speak Here's an image - a schoolboy at some sort of civic occasion staring up at the stained-glass windows in St Helens town hall. I see the town's striking motto, "Ex Terra Lucem" (out of the ground, light), in a stained-glass window. It stays in my mind but means nothing to me but boredom - the boredom of the town hall, the boredom of a teacher explaining that the motto is ungrammatical (it should be E Terra Lux). Thirty years later in that room in Soho, I put that phrase up on the wall. Out of the ground comes light. It ties together coal mining and the Resurrection. Danny finds it really striking. He mentions it to David Hockney, who is also amazed by it. Think of it, he says, the sun pours down its energy onto the surface of the planet for millennia. The leaves soak up the energy. The trees fall and turn to coal. Coal is solid sunlight, the stored memory of millions of uninhabited summers. Then one day someone opens a hole in the ground and all that stored energy comes pouring out and is consumed. Somehow all these thoughts are communicated to Thomas Heatherwick, who creates his beautiful Olympic Cauldron, in which 204 tongues of fire rise out of the ground and join to make one flame. It's an image that moved billions of people across the world. It tells a story about unity and peace. It seems to have echoes of Pentecost. But somewhere in its DNA is the motto of St Helens town council. This is another reason why Pandæmonium is an important book. Yes, it's the story of a moment in British history - perhaps the most important moment in British history. But for many nations, industrial revolution is not history. It's present. It's future. The stories of lost landscapes, of family goodbyes, of thrilling rides and new ways of seeing are being acted out today in China, and all over Africa. And in individual lives. The isle is full of noises When I first held this book in my hand, I swear I could feel it shaking with its own internal energy. Percussion is the music of industry. Rick Smith - the musical director of the ceremony - bought his own copy of this book. "I'm ashamed to tell you," he said, "how much I paid for it." He created a piece of music that caught perfectly the soaring beauty and the churning energy of industry. He did it with ranks of volunteers drumming on plastic buckets, led by Dame Evelyn Glennie. He reversed a famous line of Goethe's. "Music," he said, "is the fluid architecture we inhabit." Chameleon, Comedian, Corinthian and Caricature (David Bowie) Jennings was concerned with national identity. Of course he was, there was a war on. His most famous film is called Listen to Britain. Whenever we talked to people - whether neighbours or political leaders - about the Opening Ceremony, I could sense that there was some expectation that it would put a pin in the national identity, that we would have to decide - is Britain rural or urban, ancient or modern, riot or clean-up, roundhead or cavalier, multicultural or divided? And since the ceremony I have met people who have seen it as a celebration of industry and others who saw it as a condemnation of it. Jennings did have an agenda about the Industrial Revolution but his collage of images transcends his ideology. His book allows you to experience both the thrill and the fear, the injustice and the excitement. It puts highly charged images alongside each other and lets sparks fly between them. I think we subliminally used that lesson in the Opening Ceremony. We didn't need to do a pageant of the history of the NHS or of children's literature. We put the NHS and Voldemort and swing music and Nye Bevan and Mary Poppins all alongside each other and stood back to see what would happen. When he was asked for one word to describe the ceremony, Danny said "visceral" - the job is not to communicate an argument but to create an experience. Maybe the most important thing is that we share that experience with all its contradictions. What motivates us is who we are This book demonstrates that although the Industrial Revolution brought unprecedented wealth, it was not created by people who were interested in money. Danny Boyle's favourite passage was one called "Effects of Lightning in Northamptonshire"- an account of studying a shepherd struck by lightning. What struck Danny about it was the part that obsessive behaviour plays in discovery. Progress is not motivated by money. Progress comes from those who are happy to embark on a course of action without quite knowing where it will lead, without doing a feasibility study, without fear of failure or too much hope of reward. The engine of innovation is reckless generosity, something we celebrated at the Opening Ceremony by having Sir Tim Berners-Lee - inventor (but not patent-holder) of the World Wide Web - appear. But the whole of the 2012 Games was testament to the truth of this. People who were paid huge sums of money (G4S) scandalously failed, where those who were motivated by fun, by loyalty, by love, by idealism - the volunteers and the athletes - performed wonders in the face of real cynicism. The Olympic Park had a dystopian side - rapier missiles in the East End - but inside the stadium itself was a fragile, temporary Utopia. We discovered that no matter how much sponsorship money you pay out, you can't own or buy the Games. Games belong to those who play them. National identity is not a settled thing - it's not a typical dish or a national costume. A nation is what Philip Larkin would call "a frail, travelling coincidence" - a ragtag of people on a journey together. Jennings listened to Britain and he found that Britain was not a place but a project. To quote the Olympic programme: ..." flickering in the smoke and noise and excitement, you can sometimes glimpse a single golden thread of purpose - the idea of Jerusalem - of the better world, the world of real freedom and true equality, a world that can be built through the prosperity of industry, through the caring nation that built the welfare state, through the joyous energy of popular culture, through the dream of universal communication. A belief that we can build Jerusalem. And that it will be for everyone. This is an edited version of the foreword to Pandæmonium 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine Age as Seen by Contemporary Observers, by Humphrey Jennings [Icon Books, £16.99]