In this article, Robertson explores three different ways of interpreting the Westway. Firstly, as a modernist marker - symbolic of prevailing national urban aspirations, secondly, as autonomous machinic entity, and thirdly, as a cinematic experience. I’ve tried to provide an abbreviated version of the article below.[To dowload the full article, click here.]
Abstract
The Westway was initially designed by Patrick Abercrombie in the 1920’s. The roadway was intended to play an integral role in a network of major roads in London. Abercrombie’s
County of London Plan (1943) proposed three orbital ringways with twelve or so radial roads connecting them. This proposal survived remarkably intact in the schemes advanced by the LCC (subsequently renamed the GLC) road planners in the 1960s and early 1970s. The GLC’s highway proposals were that these roads, most entirely new, would all be more or less motorway standard with limited points of access. The Westway was conceived as one of the radial roads, linking central London with Ringway 1, the innermost of the orbital roads dubbed the “London Motorway Box”, continuing out to connect with Ringways 2 and 3.
The way in which one moves through the landscape, or cityscape, is fundamental to cultural understanding (Daniels 1996) and the changes in the mode of movement over the last 150 years have radically and permanently altered the relationship between body and land (see Schivelbusch 1980).My intention is to demonstrate that the visualities developed in “reading” the Westway as text cannot adequately describe the meaning of the spaces and that the material surface and form, with its “invisible” means of production and the sensually visual qualities of the cinematic experience of moving through the city are equally important in contributing to our understanding of urban spaces of mobility.
The promotion of Westway as technologically innovative and
socially, economically and culturally advantageous
In the booklet published by the GLC (1966) to mark the start of work on the Westway much emphasis is given to the innovative technical solutions to structural problems and the use of specially designed computer programmes to calculate the size of supports. The description of the project as “bold and imaginative” is used but it is the technical detail that is given prominence in the text. The level of detail requires considerable engineering knowledge to be fully understood so there is a sense here of trying to impress and possibly obfuscate through scientific detail, thus exemplifying modernist tropes.
Reports on the Westway around the time of its opening and in the subsequent two or three years demonstrate varying levels of endorsement. The improved radial routes, connecting to the major cross-country motorways, was enthusiastically welcomed by some commentators (Wilkins 1972), aligning the potential of the “three-ring motorway”, put forward by Abercrombie in his 1944 Greater London Plan (not acknowledged by Wilkins here) with the Boulevard Périphérique in Paris. In doing this Wilkins makes the link to a continental lifestyle by mentioning a number of Parisian public spaces and thus draws comparisons between London and European cities as a means of promoting the project to avoid “condemning us to bump along behind our European neighbours” (ibid. p.31). This desire to prove that Britain was at least equal to other European nations comes at a time when Britain’s entry to the EEC had been turned down twice by a French veto.
Professional response and public understanding
The road had been inflicted on the residents with apparently very little communication, or discussion, as to how it would be constructed and what the implications were for those living nearby (see Lovell & Morgan 1971). The question of transition in scale between the high speed, high level motorway and the existing pedestrian landscape at the ground level street were only considered once the structure was built.
At the opening ceremony for the Westway, George Clark, who set up the Golborne
Social Rights Committee (see Clark, 07.08.70), was successful in being heard to protest at the plight of those affected by the construction and proximity of the new road. Protesters, carrying banners interrupted the ribbon cutting on the road and more protesters shouted from the banner covered roof-tops of Acklam Road. The connection between humans and structure had been all but invisible up to this point; the visible and audible presence of the protesters finally exposing years of suffering. Subsequently, criticism and sympathy was voiced in the popular press and from a range of professionals questioning the value of transport policy at the expense of human needs (Mason, July 1970). So this modernist “marker” can be seen as anti-monument, full of meaning only to those who commissioned it.
Invisibilities: Westway as autonomous “machine”
In considering the Westway as animated and mechanistic, further questions arise as to the relationship of machine to the body and the body to the city; the mimetic characteristics of the structure and the occasional symbiosis of human and non-human actants suggests that the Westway is neither purely machinic, nor is it simply the product of human labour, rather it may be seen in some way as “cyborg” (see Haraway, 1991).
The well-publicised use of advanced technology and the highly mechanised process of construction for the motorway emphasised the separation of the human body, in terms of labour, and the growing structure. As we have seen before, great emphasis is given to the technologically advanced equipment used; new methods for lifting, compaction and travelling scaffolding (Contract Journal, 21.07.66).
… I could not find any image in the popular or professional press showing a human working on the construction of the Westway, giving the impression that all labour is mechanical and somehow controlled remotely. This is in marked contrast to the cinematically recorded progress of Hitler’s Autobahns in Germany from 1933, where the representation of labour was a key function (Dimendberg, 1995).
Sensual visions: Westway as cinematic experience
Highway spaces have received little attention from architects or cultural geographers but may well turn out to be amongst the most significant spaces experienced in the twentieth and twenty first centuries: “Arguably as significant to post-1930 cinema as the street and the railroad were to those earlier films engaged in charting a centralized and navigable centripetal space, cinematic representations of the motorway remain far less studied than filmic treatments of the metropolis.”
Perceptions of the relationship of body to land have changed through altered modes of transport. The “blurring” of the foreground with increased speed privileges the distant view and ultimately leads to a reliance on the panoramic view, an indiscriminate but discrete overview, for an understanding of landscape (Schivelbusch, 1980). This, together with the desire to make sense of the multiplying fragments of the metropolis, make the elevated urban highway a particularly fascinating space to study. With rail travel, the body and transporter are separated. On the other hand, the sense of synchronicity between car and driver draws them together to act as one and this has a profound effect on the perception of power and control within the environment that the action takes place. This immediacy and responsibility for the “performance” of driving has the paradoxical effect of increasing the sense of living the moment as well as empowerment and a sense of half-dreaming (captured by Petit and Sinclair in their film “London Orbital”, 2002 by long mesmerising stretches of real-time footage driving along the motorway), whereby there is some control of the choreography but also not knowing what will come next.
(London Orbital Video, 2002)
Architecture is about the experience of being surrounded whereas “film, by and large, is an experience of sitting and looking at something which is over there and not very big in field-of-vision terms but more about the event than architecture” (Keiller, interviewed by Barwell, 1997 p.163). So although architecture is made of fragments, I suggest the Westway is filmic in the celebration of its eventfulness and thereby provides the possibility to continually re-imagine the city.
Conclusion
The experience of driving across the city at high-level is already removed from all but the visual experience and the kinaesthetic sensation. The distant visions, architectural realisation and social concerns inform an understanding of the Westway but the kinetic experience of movement in the city enacted in many different ways has the potential to define the individual’s relationship with the spaces of the city and “It is only through spatial practices which trace out the city, which map-make it, that the experiences of haunting and of desire can be discerned” (Pile, 2002 p.214).
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