Time Tunnels 1

I often mention my fascination the processes of decline, regeneration and transformation that exert themselves on the fabric of any city.  Despite the best intentions of politicians, planners and developers, no living city is ever the finished article.  The laws of politics, economics or physics, and not least the unpredictable vagaries of human nature, dictate an organic situation in which shifting circumstances bring renewal to one section of a city, just as another undergoes a period of decay.  It’s this tension between clear intention and apparent randomness that fascinates me most about urban life.

It interests me greatly how, as one passes through different, (often adjacent), iterations of a city, it’s possible to interpret something of the competing assumptions that have shaped it.  I’m thinking here less about mere architectural style and more about the way that changing attitudes or philosophies (on a societal level), influence the sculpting of physical spaces - in turn dictating the way that life is lived and perceptions influenced within them.  That last part, (about perceptions), is, naturally, of particular interest to me.  One aspect of this I’ve noticed is the apparent ‘flattening out’ of hitherto multi-layered physical environments which seems to be a current trend in urban (re)development.

Despite a childhood spent amongst the picturesque historical surroundings of Lincoln, the wider Britain into which I was born was that of the Post War consensus and the supposed utopianism of the planned Modernist environment.  With the Luftwaffe having already made a pretty good start in many places, the desire to remodel large areas of Britain’s towns and cities in accordance with newer, (post Bauhaus/Le Corbusier) experimental attitudes was pretty urgent in the years between 1945 and my birth in 1962.  It was still the prevailing trend, (if noticeably running out of steam), up to the end of the 1970s, when a very different, market-driven zeitgeist really kicked in.

As a child, I remember the slightly futuristic impressions gained from our occasional family visits to more major towns.  These included Sheffield, with its immense Park Hill housing rampart and dramatic ‘Hole In The Road’, where shoppers passed below the circulating traffic; or Coventry, with its dramatic new Cathedral and somewhat space-age conjunction of intertwining ring roads and unapologetically angular architecture.  The separation of different activities into multi-layered strands was characteristic of all this, (of which the underpasses and pedestrian subways that particularly fascinate me just now are key signifiers).  It’s still illustrated by numerous vestigial portions of the Midlands towns I still haunt, such as Leicester’s inner ring road flyovers, and numerous portions of Birmingham’s city centre [1.].  Further glimpses can still be seen around Nottingham’s Boadmarsh  Shopping Centre [2].

I thought about all this again recently, as I filled a few spare minutes taking these photographs around Birmingham’s Five Ways junction.  As in so many similar locations, the plan here was to separate pedestrians from traffic by directing them beneath, through subway tunnels, here connected by a central, sunken realm at the heart of the massive roundabout.  It typifies that attitude of strict control toward separate modes of transport and activity, and resulting heavily designed and engineered solutions, that prevailed in the Modernist vision of town planning.  Like so many such solutions, it is intrinsically logical and certainly utilitarian, but perhaps compromised in terms of its assumptions about technological ‘progress’ and, more interestingly perhaps, human psychology or behaviour patterns.

As in so many such locations, it’s the physical dilapidation and clear neglect evident at Five Ways, which testify to the changing posture of our society toward both them and the theoretical frameworks they symbolise.  The fact that in recent years I have personally witnessed the filling-in and leveling out of at least two pedestrian subway systems, and the total removal of one of the city’s landmark flyovers, suggests that a very different attitude to the interaction of traffic, pedestrians and the urban environment currently holds sway.  Certainly, it appears that, to a greater extent, things are being brought back together on the same level, in a manner that seems less about imposing a variety of ‘freedom’ through idealistic prescription, and more about encouraging people to navigate their environment in slightly more opportunistic ways.

I guess I could be drawn ever deeper into discussion of how all this reflects current ideas about how cities are used by people, attempts to regulate the assumed primacy of car transport, or indeed, the economic and political drivers which control all aspects of our everyday life.  However, as usual, I fall back into focusing more on the sites that capture my imagination as evocative situations in their own right.  All of the above certainly informs my response to such places, but also reflects the way a designer might think.  I am an Artist, and I do believe there is a distinction in the two ways of thinking.  Mine is, ultimately, a subjective response to the world as I find it, more than an attempt to shape it according to any particular set of precepts.

Those theories, associations and socio-historical insights are of great potential interest to me, but always remain secondary to my subjective experience of any meaningful situation.  I can’t pretend I’m not drawn to the strange, squalid glamour of subways and urban road systems with a kind of vaguely deviant thrill, far more than any desire to analyse how the environment might be ‘improved’, [3.].  Thus, I’m prone to hanging around such places with my camera, before they’re all leveled or filled in, to the bafflement of passers-by who might prefer not to use them at all [4.].  That essentially poetic sensibility is perhaps reflected by the fact that, as usual, at Five Ways, my lens was increasingly drawn into close-up contemplation of details and poetic surfaces, in preference to the overall layout or wider topography.

All Images:  Five Ways, Birmingham, August 2014

Since taking these shots in Brum, I’ve collated a load more, taken in a couple of favourite subterranean locations in Leicester.  Therefore, I’ll continue this meditation on subways in a subsequent post in the near future.

[1.]:  Not to mention its peripheral ‘Spaghetti Junction’ motorway intersection.

[2.]:  Another childhood destination.  These trips were often about my Mother’s search for shopping experiences not available in Lincoln.  Coventry was, however, a search for a kind of modern culture fix in the new cathedral, our own being resolutely and spectacularly Medieval.

[3.]:  I’ll admit it, - I’m as susceptible to a bit of ‘ruin porn’ as the next Psychogeographer.

[4.]:  Interestingly, while photographing and filming beneath Leicester’s recently demolished Belgrave Flyover, I had many conversations with passers-by bemoaning its imminent removal.  This may be in part due to the locals’ renowned resistance to change, but some spoke with genuine affection towards it as a neighbourhood landmark.