Must The Speed Of Light Really Preclude Time Travel?

All Images:  Kings Cross-St Pancras Underground Complex, London, February 2017

Tunnels and passages have constituted a periodic sub-theme on here, being one of those categories of physical urban structure (like towers, bridges, etc) whose emotional or psychological resonance far exceeds their basic function.  It's no secret that, for years now, this essentially subjective/poetic approach to the urban environment has been almost my entire raison d'être, artistically speaking, at least.

Although it's never been a stated intention, it's fair to say that much of that vision has tended towards the entropic, the marginally dystopian, or at least toward finding poetry within the nominally mundane.  Thus, the tunnels into which my camera has been habitually drawn have tended to be those which seem to burrow into The City's more obscure, forbidding recesses, or which seem to lead back in time somehow.  Many also seem to speak of unrealised Utopias - of futures that never were, if you like.

This one, at first glance at least, would seem to offer egress to a far more inspirational vision of futurity.  It's a highly distinctive feature of the revamped Kings Cross-St. Pancras Underground complex, which I captured towards the end of a long day walking around London with my good friend Susie, earlier this year.  Even with aching feet and dwindling energy levels - we were compelled to linger for a moment in its uplifting radiance.  Indeed, this may be, I suppose, partly what the designers intended - the provision of a soothing, sensory balm for the jaded traveller.

There's something distinctly of the twenty-first century about the way this particular tunnel suffuses the pedestrian in light along its entire length.  Rather than leading one physically and symbolically toward (or indeed, away from) 'the light' as older conduits might, this one begins to transmute the entire material environment into a less tangible dimension - one in which masonry is replaced by photons.  As the more expressively manipulated of these images suggest, there's a sense of the tunnel's denizens becoming suspended in an increasingly virtual environment - in which sensory response is more important than actual physical location.  This definitely feels like something to which our current cutting-edge technologies would appear to aspire.

But, come on - you wouldn't expect me to leave such a roseate interpretation totally unmediated, would you?   Even whilst enjoying the obvious beauty of this subterranean spectacle, I'm also reminded of many of the popular science-fiction realisations of my youth.  There is more than a hint of, for instance, Dr. Who, or Star Trek, I think - and thus, of a future in which much of one's time might be spent striding along seemingly endless, over-illuminated corridors.  Something in that gentle curve suggests the USS Enterprise's superstructural disc, whilst the tunnel's clearly-visible modular structure seems to recall one of those TV budget-constrained alien complexes into which the good Doctor periodically time travelled.

It always felt a little disappointing to me that, for all their technological advances, the aliens (or indeed, the humans of the future) should favour a design aesthetic not so far removed in its sleek blandness from the average corporate H.Q.