VISUAL CULTURE
The Westway: A Road Too Far
Sandy McCreery; 2001; ‘The Westway – A road too far’; in Carchitecture; edited by Jonathan Bell; August Birkhäuser; London; pp. 68-75; ISBN 3-7643-6315-0
The Westway: A Road Too Far
It does not take any great insight to recognise that roads constitute a significant proportion of the built environment, nor that the use of motor vehicles on them has brought about extraordinary social change. Architects have seen this, and several canonical Modernists, such as Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Alison & Peter Smithson devoted considerable attention to their design. But it seems that architectural historians and cultural theorists have been remarkably blind to the issues raised by motor roads. For if we accept that architecture and culture are socially produced, how could one fail to conclude that roads, those great conduits of social transformation, must have strong relationships with architectural and cultural practice? Indeed we could argue that the architecture of the twentieth century cannot be fully understood without recognising the social effects of roads built for motor vehicles. In this essay I offer some suggestions as to how we might begin to interpret the cultural significance of motor roads. As a case in point I shall focus particularly on the circumstances surrounding the construction of the Westway; the elevated motorway, opened in 1970, that runs westwards through North Kensington from the Marylebone Road in central London.
Now one level, historical materialism can provide a rather tidy reading of roads; they are instruments of social control and have been used as such since at least Roman times. They have both served and symbolised flows of power. The 1995 Hayward Art and Power exhibition, for example, took trouble to highlight how the first motorways were built, and exploited in terms of propaganda, by the militaristic regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. And cultural Historians have begun to give increasing attention to the use of processions, notably on the new roads of sixteenth century Rome, to direct people’s minds as well as their feet. The argument linking the ‘strategic beautification’ of Hausmann’s boulevards with the social and cultural transformation of nineteenth century Paris has now been rehearsed so many times that it has begun to acquire the status of truth.
But such cases lend themselves readily to a social-power based analysis; it is generally clear who holds the whip-hand, who is controlling whom. The same cannot be said for the urban motorways of late twentieth century Western democracies, such as the Westway. In this contemporary context power is overwhelmingly mediated through money, not force, and its machinations less overt. With private motorised transport now an option for increasing numbers of people it becomes much harder to pinpoint who exactly are the winners, and who the losers. It seems that we all, in different and complex configurations, experience both benefits and drawbacks. And it would be over-simplistic, if not simply wrong, to argue that the capitalist is necessarily the winner; several of the world’s wealthiest nations have built relatively few motorways, and Doncaster (on the A1(M) motorway) is no boom-town. Indeed there are those who argue quite forcefully against there being any direct connection between road-building and economic development.
Now I believe that road-building does serve capitalism, but that the means are cultural at least as much as they are economic, and it is the ideological superstructure that I wish to give attention to here. Roads change the cultural basis of society, and in doing so they pave the way for a deepening of capitalist economic relations. Building a road does not, in itself, make you rich. Indeed it may well make you poorer. But it is the socio-spatial and cultural changes that appear to inevitably follow that render a place unable to resist further intensifications of capitalism. This brings me to an interpretative model which I believe is particularly useful for understanding the cultural and political ideology that has surrounded road-building (particularly in Britain) since the Second World War. It is intended that this should augment historical materialist approaches.
My contention is that two opposed paradigms, the Village and the Metropolis have been fundamental to the discourse of social space formation. These are, precisely, representations, intellectual constructs that have no real place outside the mind, although in the Lefebvrian manner they relate to the lived experience of concrete space. Within capitalism we can conceive of the Village as essentially defensive, a space of resistance, and the Metropolis as invasive. As notions they have a tenuous relationship with Lefebvre’s understanding of appropriated and dominated space . I argue that the Metropolis has been of immense service to the continuing intensification of capitalism, and driving along the Westway is one of the most Metropolitan experiences available in London.
The Westway was planned by the London County Council, who claimed to be responding to a scientific analysis of the transport needs of Londoners. Their 1951 County of London Development Plan, in which the motorway was first proposed, identified two priorities; roads to alleviate congestion in the central area between Marble Arch and Aldgate, and roads to improve orbital circulation. Yet, as a radial route outside the centre, the Westway met neither of these criteria. Indeed it could only encourage more commuter cars into the congested centre, whilst at the same time exposing London’s economy to increased competition from out-lying areas.
The Westway was not a response to existing needs, it was a response to a vision of a new kind of urban society; a Metropolitan vision.
This notion of the Metropolis can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, as it is implicit within Baudelaire’s conception of the flaneur. Baudelaire took the anonymous urban crowd as a positive metaphor of the urban condition. Modernists came to celebrate the urban experience for its freedom from social relations, even if they might regret the extent to which culture had become objectified.
Much of the excitement, and much of the threat, of the city came from the possibility of autonomous, sexually-charged, social encounters. The inevitable emotional detachment of the urban experience, the separation of lust from love, allowed a new control over desire. One has a degree of mastery over the individual reduced to a body, a detached object of pleasure. The Metropolis is sexy precisely because it is reified. This conflation of subject and object has been exploited for its sexual interest by imagemakers throughout this century, whether we think of the soft curves of motor car styling, or Madonna’s mechanistic basque and ‘boy toys’.
A distinguishing feature of modern urban life, and one which contributed enormously to its liberating alienation, has been the control of space and time, or speed. When seeking to explain why young boys enjoyed fantasies of becoming train drivers, Freud in Infantile Sexuality, suggested it derived from the combination of fear and mechanical agitation. In the motor age, I suspect that it has more to do with control. Vehicles respond on demand, they do not answer back, they offer instant gratification, they provide a spectacle of individual control. In the Metropolis you may be isolated and intimidated, but you can also be mobile, independent, sexually-aware, in control.
The Metropolis makes it possible for the heroic architect to stand apart from society. This outlook was evident in Le Corbusier’s detached perspectives; only the privileged master-planner could have enjoyed his views. And these were exactly the viewpoints adopted in the London County Council’s rendering of the proposed Westway [fig. 1]. Indeed most of the architectural and planning imagery of the Metropolitan ideal in Britain derives from Le Corbusier. In their influential ‘Cluster City’ essay of 1957, the Smithson’s quoted Le Corbusier;when night intervened the passage of cars along the autostrada traces luminous tracks that are like the trails of meteors flashing across the summer heavens
They went on to acknowledge that ‘we still respond to this dream,’ of people as shining objects speeding through space. And they were not alone. So too did the many city planning departments that sought to recreate the scene, particularly during the 1960s.
The economic basis of Le Corbusier’s vision was a massive increase in the consumption of personal motorised transport. This, of course, was an enormously attractive proposition to capitalists, and it is no surprise that Le Corbusier received the funding to prepare his early schemes from car manufacturers. However, it is worth our remembering, although town-planners of the 1960s tended to forget, that he actually sought to reconcile the Metropolis with the Village. His schemes of the 1920s did not envisage that all citizens would become motorised. His Contemporary City for Three Million People, for example, proposed an inner-core of one million motorised people, surrounded by workers’ garden city communities, housing two million. Eventually his motorised citizens would be housed in his floating urban co-operative communities; unités. But the need for Le Corbusier’s schemes to be applied in total if the Village was to provide a brake to the increasing alienation of urban life was apparently lost on the London County Council planners.
Le Corbusier’s image was forty years old before the construction of the Westway. This delay could be explained solely in terms of economic and political conditions; that Britain’s economy had been limping through depression and war until 1960. Then Ernest Marples, whose family fortune came from civil engineering, was appointed Conservative Minister of State for Transport. He was able to promote Le Corbusier’s vision with the aid of research showing that 60% of car owners voted Conservative, whereas only 11% voted Labour. The image was also attractive to the Labour opposition, who throughout the late 50s and early 60s repeatedly attacked the Government for not supporting Britain’s most important industry; motor manufacturing.
But this can only be a partial explanation. The car industry did not suddenly become important in 1960, nor did motorists suddenly decide to vote Conservative. If the motor industry was crucial to the British economy, then why was road building not prioritised more in 1945? My view is that it was largely because of the continuing strength in planning discourse of the notion of the Village.
Conceiving the Village as the model of a cohesive, stable, supportive community has a long tradition in British architectural and social thought stretching back to Ruskin and Morris. For them, medieval (and pre-capitalist) rural communities offered the antidote to social fragmentation. Even if they did not use such language, the Village was the arena in which unalienated dwelling remained possible. Ebenezer Howard’s interpretation in Garden Cities of Tomorrow makes it clear that he saw the communal ownership of land as a means of keeping capitalism at bay; preventing private interests taking precedence over those of the collective. This notion of the Village was particularly potent immediately after the Second World War. Six years of being told to pull together, and to a large extent doing it, helped foster a dominant little-Britain Village mentality.
By way of an illustration, The Exhibition of Architecture at the 1951 Festival of Britain was intended to demonstrate how science and planning, epitomised by the 1943 County of London Plan, would transform Britain’s cities. That plan had in fact listed traffic congestion as the number one problem needing solution, yet this was totally played-down at the festival. The exhibit consisted of an area of the bombed East End that had been partially rebuilt as, to use their contemporary description, the ‘neighbourhood of Lansbury’. The accompanying catalogue focused consistently on the notion of the Village :London has grown in a sprawling fashion, gradually swallowing up the surrounding villages and open fields, and replacing them by drab suburbs with ill-defined boundaries. In spite of this, recognisable communities still survive with strong local loyalties. A sense of community, of neighbourly responsibility, satisfies an essential human need. the underlying purpose of the Plan was to encourage this sense and stimulate or revive these communities and loyalties.
This is the Village versus the Metropolis. This is why they chose to exhibit lived-in buildings. Lansbury was intended to be a scientifically planned Village community. It may well be numbingly dull architecturally, but it was the human subjects on display, not the architectural objects. Needless to say, there were no major new roads at Lansbury [fig. 2].
Now Village-informed communities can be an attractive option to capitalists when built from scratch, on new sites, introducing entirely new places and patterns of consumption. The new towns policy was pursued with vigour after the second world war. But existing communities, particularly in urban areas where home ownership remained comparatively low, were noticeably resistant to any intensification of capitalism. If capitalism was to continue to find arenas for expansion in 1960 after the initial post-war rebuilding, then it needed to penetrate such places. Road building, usually combined with comprehensive slum clearance schemes (as urban roads will always be routed through the poorer areas of town), was to provide the solution.
Urban motorways are not effective simply because they destroy the fabric of existing social spaces, but because they introduce a new culture; a reified Metropolitan culture, which Modernism had rendered attractive, and that produces a deepening demand for capitalism’s products. Roads are not dominant space just because they dominate their social surroundings, but also because they provide the arena in which the spectacle of commodity domination is performed.
Probably nowhere is the experience of reified culture more intense than on an urban motorway. We may have a deeply satisfying relationship with our car, but we cannot engage in spontaneous social interaction, nor can we walk, stop, get drunk, or be one of the millions excluded from using motor vehicles for a host of reasons. We can only go where the road takes us, at the pace it dictates. And yet modernism projected these as the great symbols of Metropolitan freedom. I argue that the freedom they actually offer is from the notion of the Village. There are no new destinations, only re-packaged ones. But on route many of the social spaces in which the unfolding contest between the Metropolis and the Village was actually lived, have been destroyed [fig. 3].
Roads have been uniquely successful in assisting capitalism. In the mid-1980s it was estimated that as much as a half of the world’s measured economic activity may be concerned with the making, fuelling and maintenance of motor vehicles. But it is their unseen role in consistently deepening the reification of culture that is most powerful. As the spaces of social relations are broken down, so our need to live our emotional lives through commodities increases.
A collision occurred at the Westway in 1970; a dominant space of capitalism ran into a resistant urban community [fig. 4]. The principal activists were George Clark and John O’Malley, both of whom were members of the London New Left Club, and it would be interesting to know what informed their actions. Certainly there are striking parallels between what happened in North Kensington and the ideas of the radical French Left, particularly those of Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist International. Clark and O’Malley encouraged the appropriation of space through the production of art works and street festivals. They were also particularly concerned to appropriate play space, and scored a notable success with a series of mass trespasses into Powis Square, a private square closed to the public, which forced the council to buy it for a children’s play area. These were model tactics of the French left for whom play had enormous significance as a remaining area of unalienated activity which could lead to personal, and therefore political, reawakening.
The Westway conflict also originally centred around play space which the local community, again with O’Malley’s encouragement, had appropriated under the flyover. It was when the contractors tried to close this off with concrete walls to form commuter car parks, that the battle erupted. It was the North Kensington Play space Group, led by O’Malley that scored the first success against the road-builders, when they discovered that the council had not granted itself planning permission for the car parks. They had the legal means to delay construction, and after six weeks the council capitulated entirely, agreeing to the protesters demands that all the space under the motorway should be used for community purposes, even though only the vaguest of plans were being proposed. It is safe to assume that free market capitalism would otherwise have been unlikely to provide the horse-riding stables, sports centre, studio spaces, playgrounds and covered market that are to be found under the Westway today. We can understand this as a concrete synthesis between the Metropolis and the Village.
But regarding the other aspect to the conflict, housing, there appears to have been no such reconciliation. Clarke and O’Malley mounted an extremely effective publicity campaign that ran off the back of the London County Council’s own promotion of the road. Many locals were eventually re-housed, but that cost the demolition of their own community, whereas the motorway remains. True, the Greater London Council were consequently forced to abandon their planned massive construction of elevated motorways in inner London, but, more slowly, new motorways are arriving.
Capitalism has continued to intensify along the Westway corridor. Large areas around Western Avenue, the Westway’s continuation, have recently gone through rapid re-shaping dedicated to motorised passive consumption. Probably nowhere else around London so closely resembles a North American ‘Edge City’. The road itself was, until very recently, scheduled to be widened. This has already involved the demolition of part of the Wormholt estate, a model 1920s Village development of ‘homes fit for heroes’. To walk by today, the sense of loss, both in terms of social space and social time, can be overwhelming. This is now a placeless, memory-less, social void. But to speed by, and up on to the Westway, that is to be in control. [fig. 6]. Or is it?