Underpass!

The Fantastic Journal, fairly fantastic, on the beauty and strangeness of the English Motorway System - and making the very apposite point that a motorway designed by anonymous concrete engineers will always be better than one designed by Santiago Calatrava. In fact there is one small stretch of English motorway that is 'designed' - on the edge of the M25, near Bluewater there's a section where the concrete is moulded to resemble Disneyland fibreglass, and given a (spit) friendly look. Nonetheless, there's nothing that can so slice a city into discrete parts, never to be joined together again, than a motorway - far, far more destructive of communities than the dark and reviled figure of the council estate designer, who did usually go hand in hand with them.



Although I almost admire the way that 60s planners could efface huge chunks of city to get these roads and conduits built - something utterly unimaginable today - I can think of two examples from places I've lived where a motorway or dual carriageway tears up urban fabric in a pretty grotesque fashion. In Southampton, the St Mary's area is sliced off from the city centre by a dual carriageway servicing the exodus from shopping mall to Hampshire suburb, instantly creating a ghetto; while where I live in SE London is sliced up by the Blackwall tunnel approach, ensuring, for instance, that the new enclave of Millennium Village is forever divorced from East Greenwich and Charlton, except via one footbridge which, despite a St Louis (or EUR) referencing arch, is designed in such a manner that you can never see if there's anyone in front of you - not terribly pleasant at 2am with only the looming skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, a silo or three and some cabs zooming past at 80mph for company. Similarly, the all but impassable road to Kent saves the inhabitants of Woolwich's Royal Arsenal colony from having to notice that they live in one of the biggest West African areas in London.



The element in the urban motorway that is perhaps most defensible is the one that is considered the most ugly - the flyover. The flyover not only provides the most sublime vistas and structures of the motorway - those monumental, thick legs upon which they lift themselves from the ground, the elevation and sense of the vertiginous on the way up - but in the way that, like a railway bridge, they actually add to the dynamism and excitement of urban life. Most obviously in the manner that the Westway left places like Ladbroke Grove intact by raising itself above them, enabling perhaps their eventual gentrification, but even the more prosaic Blackwall stretch suddenly achieves a poetry when it lifts itself from the ground, leaving the pedestrian to negotiate a series of columns and spaces that could become the venue for all kinds of extraordinary activity, if only it wasn't for all the sodding cars.

(Images taken from the J.G Ballard Flickr Pool...)