Time Tunnels 2

…Being the second installment of a meditation on subways and underpasses.

These subways are a major draw for me at the moment.  It seems to be the case that certain (often, seemingly insignificant or mundane) corners of the city can suddenly acquire a particular resonance for me, as if seen in a new light.  The specific location depicted here certainly fits that bill, being a small portion of Leicester of which I’ve been aware for many years, but which I’m currently relishing, as though encountering it for the first time on each of my recent visits with bicycle and camera.

A recent Quietus piece focuses on the parallels between comic book Magus, Alan Moore, and modern Psychogeography’s presiding literary genius, Iain Sinclair.  It seems to point towards a particular way of looking and reading cities to which I would generally subscribe.  In it, Moore states,

“…it was the the remarkable quality of Iain’s writing that blew me away as much as the concepts he was utilising; it was his approach to language itself; this incredible intellectual density, which I think a lot of people find off-putting at first, but the richness, that Iain can bring to a crack in the pavement.” [1.].

And later, speaking of his own ‘Jerusalem’ [2.],

“…it’s a work that is not just focused on Northampton but on the half a square mile of Northampton in which I grew up, and is approaching half a million words, and I can imagine that my next book will be a million words and focused entirely on one paving slab…” [3.].

In my previous post on the subway theme, I embarked on a somewhat woolly reflection on the socio-historical significance of such sites, before concluding that, once the theories are all stripped away, my core response to is as much subjective or poetic as conceptual.  In reality, I think what I really want is for the spontaneous recognition of some resonance of place to coexist on equal terms with the subsequent possible associations and theories that may adhere to it.  It’s a kind of internal/external or micro/macro perception of the world around me, I guess, and some kind of justification for the way my own lens keeps focusing in, somewhat obsessively, on the grimy details and eloquent patinas of the places I document.  I certainly can’t claim to be working on the same elevated plane as Sinclair and Moore, and certainly lack their intellectual rigor, store of acquired knowledge, or research skills, but Moore’s references to ”A crack in the pavement” and “One paving slab”, certainly strike a chord with me.

Anyway, I’ll devote the rest of this post to exploring what exactly excites me so much about one shabby little spot in Leicester.

This particular place is a combination of pedestrian subways and road underpass beneath Leicester’s St Margaret’s Way.  It’s actually a few yards from another favourite haunt, shown on here more than once, where that main artery is borne over the River Soar.  However, here, it’s Friday Street that passes beneath, - a relatively quiet, slightly eerie thoroughfare, linking one drab warren of industrial units with a more varied, but hardly less glamorous zone to the east, where numerous businesses occupy premises varying from the contemporary shed, to larger, crumbling edifices from Leicester’s industrial heyday.  It thus forms an important link in exactly the kind of overlooked ‘Interzone’ [4.] that regularly captures my imagination.

I love the way the excavation creates a small pocket of resonant underworld that most people are oblivious to as they soar above it on the dual carriageway.  Like many towns that experienced significant post-war redevelopment, Leicester has numerous examples where such newly swollen roads were driven through pre-existing street plans, often creating intriguing non-places and a sense of truncated communities where established neighbourhoods were bisected.  A disheveled metallic plaque commemorates the opening of the subways in 1971 and the site seems to symbolise the way that the planners of that age envisaged an environment in which pedestrian access was deliberately separated out from motor transport, whilst unquestioningly assuming the new primacy of the car in modern towns.

On a more immediate level, however, what I really respond to is the opportunity to literally scratch beneath the surface of the city, and to experience a dynamic, sensory environment rendered as a deterministic physical statement.  Such places only really resemble themselves, and there are a whole set of instinctive responses often pertaining to them.  For me these include a distinct thrill at the hard angled edges and monumentally functional architecture of sculpted concrete.  It’s almost like a kind of bold Land Art in which dramatic topographical interventions are made in order to find out what it feels like to traverse this passage, descend beneath that level or pass between those high, overbearing walls.

Seen through unjaded eyes, there is actually a sense of a vaguely futuristic playground about it all and, as with all good ones, a touch of implied jeopardy lies at the core of its appeal.  There’s a palpable edge of claustrophobia as one descends beneath ground level, and our hard-wired unease at entering the unknown is magnified by the broken sight lines created amidst 180-degree switchback ramps.  Only having emerged at right angles into the underpass proper does one really get a view of what lies in wait and the light flooding in at each end. 

Friday Street and its accompanying footpath perform a short, parabolic swoop through what is effectively a tunnel of corrugated concrete walls and a ceiling formed by the underside of the main road.  It would be disingenuous to pretend that some of my attraction to this place isn’t partly due to my child-like enjoyment of navigating it by bike.  The ramps and changes in grade and direction provide a mild technical riding challenge and some scope to go ‘wheeeee!’ once the brakes are released.  Consequently, I’ve deliberately built this place into my route on those days when I cycle to and from work.

Like all such places, acoustic qualities contribute massively to its impact on the visitor.  Indeed, the relative paucity of traffic on Friday Street mean that one can really appreciate the sonic spaces between each sound event that emanates from both above and below, before reverberating from the surrounding concrete.  I’m also struck by that slight sense of mistrust one always has of those travellers in less frequented thoroughfares.  Often, the quieter places are the most forbidding in cities, as one speculates on exactly what brings those occasional visitors that are in evidence, to them, [5.].

Illumination is another important element in my apprehension of this place.  This is most obviously experienced in the juxtaposition of the shadowy netherworld of the underpass and the daylight flooding in from either end.  As ever, a little time spent in such places reveals that they are not, as often thought, dead, grey environments, but that the concrete can both absorb and reflect light in a number of intriguing ways specific to itself.  To this is added the dramatic reflections that can bounce from puddles of standing water after heavy rain [6.].  Inevitably, the whole place also takes on a completely distinct quality after dark when greyish concrete is lit up by the alien, (and potentially alienating), glow of yellowish public lighting.

As so often witnessed in such portions of under-maintained infrastructure, the intermittent flickering of faulty lighting creates a deliciously unbalanced quality.  I’m always reminded how often David Lynch has used that particular effect in his films to suggest moments of psychic fracture or unidentified threat.  Whilst we’re on with sinister motifs, it’s impossible to ignore the bulbous spiders eagerly devouring their prey from webs they construct in the illuminated halo around each light unit, (another Lynchian device, I now realise).

In terms of illumination, my favourite time to visit is twilight, when the juxtaposition is most dramatic between the artificial light from within the little subterranean complex, and the increasingly blue light infiltrating from beyond.  There are usually a few magic minutes when I can force my hand-held exposures far enough to capture a few elusive and distinctly hyper-real images.  I’d be lying if I said I don’t enjoy the wholly fictitious, fiery glow resulting from my camera’s struggle with its White Balance in such situations.

There is one other affecting way in which light and colour manifest themselves in the subways, namely through the rather startling sky blue tiles cladding the walls of the ramps.  Although stained and regularly augmented by tags, these retain a kind of tired beauty, particularly when reflections are caught by their still glossy surfaces.  The grouting between has also absorbed a sporadic polychromatic residue where graffiti has been removed from the impermeable tiles themselves.  I find something poignant in this slightly tawdry attempt to beautify an otherwise functional environment on the part of the architects, and their faith in the quality of tough, hard-edged materials to do so.  It may have all been fairly pragmatic in construction, but it still hints at a now faded belief in the wholly rational ideals of Modernism to create a better world.

In an age when the only justification for any new contribution to the built environment is the bottom line, such idealism, however misplaced, actually seems rather quaint.  There’s no doubt this idea of a failed Utopian vision exerts a powerful hold over my imagination in such places.  It is, after all, a world into which I was born, and yet one in which once-lofty ideals only engendered a seeming alienation that has become, largely, just taken as read by subsequent generations.

All Images:  St Margarets Way, Leicester, April. July & August 2014

[1.], [3.]:  Nick Talbot, ‘”A Funny Kind Of Relationship” Alan Moore On Iain Sinclair’, (A Quietus Interview), www.thequietus.com, 7 June 2014.

[2.]:  Alan Moore, ‘Jerusalem’, (A sprawling novel about Northampton.  Still, as yet unpublished, - as far as I can ascertain).

[4.]:  I can’t claim ownership of this particular term.  William Burrows, Joy Division and Will Self have all employed it at different points, to my knowledge.  My own fascination is often as much with the kind of liminal zones of connecting vacancy or supposed insignificance that often lie well within city boundaries, as with the more peripheral locations with which it is often associated.

[5.]:  I can only speculate about how suspicious I myself might look to others, lurking around under there with my camera.

[6.]:  In fact, although it’s a nominally dry environment, water plays a distinct part in my impressions here, be it the sinister greenish ooze extending across the footpath from a manhole at the foot of one subway ramp, or the spontaneous, slightly alarming spring witnessed spurting from between two sections of the underpass wall after a recent deluge.

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.