Time Tunnels 3

As so often, I embarked on what I thought would be a fairly brief post to showcase a few photographs taken at Birmingham’s Five Ways Junction, only to discover that a wider theme had established itself in my mind/camera.  Hence, this is the third in a trio of recent posts on the subject of subways and underpasses in Birmingham and Leicester.  The subterranean element of urban topography is a general subject I’ve touched on before, (and I’m sure I will again), but for now, this reflection belongs together with the previous two, as a discrete little trilogy.

Last time, I discussed a favourite resonant location beneath the dual carriageway of Leicester’s St Margaret’s Way.  The site depicted here is actually only a few hundred metres further along the same route, at the point where it terminates at the Inner Ring Road that bounds the city centre.  As such, it forms a nexus, not unlike the Burley’s Flyover/Roundabout that features in my ‘Belgrave Gate Project’.  I’ve wondered occasionally about embarking on an in-depth study of the entire circuit, and the junctions that punctuate it.  However, recent progress on the BGP itself has been sporadic to say the least, and appears to be a bit stalled again currently, so the last thing I really need is to bite off even more than I can chew.  A little short term organisational discipline is something I’d do well to keep in mind within my artistic practice generally.  Who knows? – perhaps these piecemeal explorations will all just join up organically one day.

The Friday Street underpass, and associated pedestrian subway, link two slightly liminal zones, but this system lies beneath the far more significant junction of St Margaret’s Way, Vaughan Way and Burleys Way, in the Inner Ring’s northwestern quadrant.  Here, one really sees how a city like Leicester was significantly remodeled after the Second World War to facilitate the explosion in motor transport.  Such dualled thoroughfares were clearly designed to aid the passage of vehicles in and out of the commercial centre without overwhelming it, and carry immense quantities of traffic each day, [1.].  As was the trend at the time, pedestrian access was very consciously separated out at the junction, (not necessarily a misguided strategy), and driven below ground, (with implications possibly rather different from the planners’ original intentions).

This three-pronged underground complex feels much tighter in than Five Ways in Birmingham, lying as it does beneath what is essentially a T-junction, rather than a huge roundabout.  What really characterises it is the way its three narrow tunnels meet in a small, triangular non-place at its centre.  Although open to the sky, this isn’t the wide, communal space, complete with refreshment stop, at the centre of Five Ways.  It’s anonymous and largely functional, featuring minimal, desultory landscaping and neglected planting.  Wedged between high, blank walls, it’s almost invisible from the road above and really little more than a light well.

And yet, as so often with these overlooked holes in the map, this place captures my imagination in a surprisingly powerful way.  I’ve already noted,  that they often only really resemble themselves and they can certainly seem highly specific and strangely hermetic.  To loiter in this one feels like being isolated in a negative space, separated from normality, and (literally), on a different plane from the urgency of the surrounding city.  Perhaps this essential strangeness was always at the heart of the Modernist dream, (for, surely that is what it was).  There was an unashamed futurism in its intent, and an unfamiliar space age aspect to its aesthetic after the War, generally.  There is, I think, still a kind of alien thrill to be experienced in such places that recalls numerous visions of Science Fiction, however dystopian.

More prosaically, it seems that, despite a willingness to provide separate, (and theoretically safer) provision for pedestrians, walking was somehow deemed to be becoming a somewhat marginal activity in the minds of the town planners and social engineers of the period.  In an era when cars, (or even monorails or helicopters), seemed set to dominate the urban landscape, perhaps it felt more natural to direct foot traffic through a proscribed warren of functional but potentially alienating hidden conduits, with little thought for the psychological implications.

And, inevitably, it’s that psychological or perceptual element which impacts on me most strongly in these places.  The tunnels at St. Margaret’s are narrow and relatively dark, and as is so often the case in these places, one enters them at an angle to one’s direction of descent from street level.  Apprehension over exactly what might be waiting in the shadows or around corners is natural and would likely be hard-wired on an instinctive, animal level, even were we not already socially primed with the fear of potential muggings, (or worse).  The designers of these passages couldn’t have created a situation more suited to ambush if they’d tried, to the point where subways have become a recognised cliché of urban paranoia.  Some of my photos capitalise on this rather opportunistically, but it’s impossible not to read an air of vulnerability or isolation in the silhouetted figures of passers-by.

In this context it’s always a shock to encounter the huddled forms of rough sleepers in these places.  The immediate reaction is to feel wary of these subterranean denizens, but I quickly end up suspecting they are the most vulnerable of all down there, and can’t shake off my impression of lost phantoms haunting the deepest, forgotten levels of society.  Should that all sound too fanciful, it’s important to remember these are real people, each with a story to tell.  We could all be there given the wrong set of circumstances, and who wouldn’t seek out the shelter and relative quiet of the tunnels in a similar situation?  Either way, it’s another aspect of how far a society’s dreams of its future, (or the stories it tells about its present), can diverge from reality.

This idea of the dark tunnel as a potential refuge is an obvious one.  Although we generally feel safer in well-lit places with unbroken sight lines, it’s worth remembering that the population for whom these tunnels were constructed were only a few years removed from memories of Blitzkrieg bomb shelters, or indeed, the notion of the Cold War nuclear bunker.  If, as a society, we now prefer to walk more confidently in the light at or above ground level, and to construct environments of a far less austere or authoritarian stamp [2.], does this imply we feel more secure?  Are we niaive to feel that way, or do the real potential threats to our wellbeing now come from within rather than from above?

As before, it’s the qualities of illumination in these subways that possibly affect me most on a purely perceptual level.  Indeed, looking back, I realise that light, (and it’s artificial provision), runs through all three pieces as a major theme.  Thus it is that, several of these images here self-consciously accentuate the limitations of photography in dealing with my movement in and out of dark tunnels on a bright day.  I’ll openly admit to some fairly overt Photoshop manipulation in order to maximise both the sense of profound, impenetrable shadow, (and resulting trepidation), within, or indeed the overwhelming overload of light one can experience on emerging.  In either situation, it’s that sense of sensory deprivation, and of being unable to accurately locate yourself within your surroundings that packs the real psychological punch.

I’m also very drawn to the play of reflected light on the internal surfaces of the tunnels themselves.  This is particularly interesting where it deflects off layers of glossy industrial paint applied to crumbling and flaking ceilings, and where heavy duty, textured rubber floor coverings also display a surprising reflective sheen.  Again, there’s a distinct flavour of dystopian grunge to this.  Much has been written about how the bright techno-fetishism of 1960s and 70s Science Fiction visualisations, gave way to the grimmer, disillusioned chiaroscuro of the Post-Modern era.  I’m often led to think of a film like ‘Event Horizon’ [3.], or Ridley Scott’s vision for ‘Alien’ [4.], as I move along the passages.

Aesthetically, the ramps and steps down to the tunnels at St Margaret’s lack the switchback dynamism or attempts at tiled enhancement seen up the road.  The high walls are generally blank and colourless and overlook dilapidated, yellow-painted crash barriers that only magnify the air of bald functionality.  It’s also difficult to overlook the strong smell of piss that lurks down here.  The prosaic fact is that the subways lie close to various nightspots and drinking holes, and that intoxicated public incontinence is a defining feature of the British weekend.  However, such places were becoming generally despised by the British public, almost as soon as they appeared, and the squalor and neglect which most now display just illustrates the mismatch between the baldly rational assumptions of planned Modernism and the messy, organic realities of human behaviour.  It’s tempting to think of the glee with which lab rats might casually soil the mazes that research scientists have constructed for them.

If any further proof were needed of just how arbitrary was the twentieth century remodeling of portions of a city like Leicester, one need only return to ground level via the ramp adjacent to St Margaret’s Church.  There’s an open area of landscaping here that differs from the rest of the complex with its red brick masonry and elements of vegetation.  It was obviously intended as a place that people might want to sit and relax, (and perhaps take lung-fulls of heavily polluted air from the adjacent road system), but is generally populated by street drinkers these days.

The medieval building of St Margaret’s itself is a sizable edifice and one of the most significant churches of old Leicester.  I note with interest that much of the land in this part of Leicester was once owned by the Bishop of my hometown, Lincoln, a fact that points to a very different, system of organising urban territory that was taken for granted up until the twentieth century.  To pass into the church grounds, amongst tall trees and ancient grave stones, is to step back several centuries, but it’s now a small standing pool of abandoned time, constrained on all sides by the physical manifestations of commercial, workaday Leicester.

All Images: St Margaret's Way/Vaughan Way/Burleys Way,
August 2014

St Margaret’s Way itself follows the old Church Gate route, a significant artery of the historical street plan, but the contrast couldn’t be greater between the narrow section still lying within the ring road, and the major dual carriageway that now sidelines the church rather than leading to it.  Seen from this perspective, it’s possible to appreciate to what extent the inner orbital is as much a fracture in time, as in physical space.  The assumptions that shaped the subways beneath it are themselves increasingly lost in time as illustrated by the presence of the recent Highcross shopping development overlooking the ring a few hundred metres away.  It’s mirrored surfaces, and elevated glass bridges augment a shiny, happy cathedral of consumerist lifestyle, and represent a very different relationship of the public to urban space.  But that’s a different story…

[1.]:  Architecturally, this whole stretch of the inner ring feels rather typical of that period, and retains the remnants of a fairly cohesive ‘mood’, despite significant recent changes.  There remain numerous Modernist edifices of the functional rather than spectacular variety, and a general sense of a once-optimistic vision of the city’s future now stranded in time.  I drive this way regularly and, at times when traffic flow overwhelms the system, often indulge in a near-stationary variety of what I think of as ‘Pyschogeographical Driving’.  This is a departure from the classical idea of Psychogeography as an activity centred on walking, but to me, another very significant way of experiencing the city.

[2.]:  Ironically, the brighter, sleeker iterations of cities we increasingly inhabit often reflect a society far less invested in notions of equality of opportunity, open access, communality or freedom, than those that prevailed when these hard, concrete environments were envisaged.

[3.]:  Ridley Scott (Dir.), ‘Alien’, USA, Brandywine Productions/20^th Century Fox, 1979. 

Paul Anderson (Dir.), ‘Event Horizon’, UK/USA, Golar Productions/Impact Pictures/Paramount Pictures, 1997.

[4.]:  Scott’s original film is of course, widely accepted as one of the all time great cinematic evocations of our fear of dark tunnels and what might be lurking there.  I’m sure readers can provide their own list of other creepy, tunnel-based films, just emphasising an insecurity that never loses its power for most of us.  Certain scenes from both Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ and Danny Boyle’s ‘Twenty Eight Days Later’ are other fairly obvious examples that would feature high on my own personal list.

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.