12/18/2023 0 Comments Subvert castleford skateparkA modernity where we share space with strangers in a public place free of the constraints of our normal surroundings with their familiarity. In a revelatory, even revolutionary statement he says, 'I began to see my fellow service station users as individuals', and continues, speculating: Maybe breaking motorway journeys in architecturally designed film sets with their interiors of garish colours, harsh lighting, and hidden CCTV surveillance cameras allows people to be themselves. In his fantastic book Destination Nowhere Roger Green details the 18 months in which he spent some part of each day or night - often hours on end - in South Mimms Service Station on the M25, at first as a detached observer of life in that place but soon embroiled in it himself, as he got to know the people who worked there and the regular users, and they got to know him. Tim's passionate discourse on the subject, though, has helped me to realise that actually there was a lot more going on for those drivers just then, that they were each performing all the minute physical and mental functions required to help them through that particular passage, and relating to their surroundings, wondering about the bloke they'd seen above them gripping tight hold of a camera he was pointing towards them as they passed.Īnd any motorway service station has a sociability and a spirituality about it. I looked at the intensity in the drivers' eyes as the road reared up before them at 70 mph plus, and - aligning myself with the conventional view of what these drivers were doing - I interpreted their look as a dullness, a deadness, a switched-off state. I was a vulnerable pedestrian standing nervously on a thin metallic construction which shuddered with the eddying currents sent up by every container wagon, 4-by-4 and saloon car. On my motorway walk I spent hours standing on bridges above the M62, watching thousands of people pass beneath. disrupt composure, even more so when large trucks pass by with a jolt instigating a firmer grip on the wheel.' road surfaces which dip our vehicle toward the hard shoulder. the motorway journey is full of smells, sounds, and tactilities, producing a corporeal sociality that inheres in the intimate relationship between bodies and cars and the spaces through which they move, the distinctive roadscapes, particular models, road textures, and driving conventions and habits.Tim celebrates what he calls the ritualistic process of motorway driving, in which we are 'constantly mutating and creating' as we interact with cones and temporary narrow lanes. Tim has published a paper entitled, M6 Junction 19-16: Defamiliarizing the Mundane Roadscape, in which he insists that. At a psychogeography festival in Manchester recently I met Tim Edensor who has written learnedly in defence of motorway driving against the conventional assumption that it is a numbing, soulless experience. like when standing on the hillside above Booth Hall Farm watching the traffic steadily flowing across the high Pennines like a metallic ribbon glittering in the sunshine, I was won over by the wonder.'Īnd any motorway has a fascination about it. In my own book, Walking the M62, a diary of my journey, I described the sense of awe I had on 'the best days. ![]() Helped confirm for me the direction my route should take. I did a walk last autumn, spent the whole of September and October following the M62 corridor all the way from Hull back home to Liverpool, and reflecting back on that adventure now, I realise that one of the inspirations for my journey was Bill's quote. Driving it east to west is always best, especially at the close of the day into the setting sun. Chuck Berry can keep his Route 66, Kerouac his two-lane black top, Paul Simon his New Jersey Turnpike, Billy Bragg his A13. Even saying its name fills me with a longing. got out of Hull and on to the most alluring, powerful, even magical motorway on our lump of an island. ![]() Listen to this quote by Bill Drummond, from his book How to be an Artist: I.
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