In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway
Edited by Edward Chell and Andrew Taylor

Soft Estate by Edward Chell

Because they are rarely seen statically, roadscapes undermine our Ruskinian ideal of landscape as a view seen at once from a privileged vantage point by a single viewer…our culture has learnt to interpret landscapes in a particular way – to read water meadows as picturesque, mountains as rugged or fenland as inscrutable. But we haven’t been taught to read roadscapes, because they seem too mundane and too fleetingly viewed to form any part of any imagined ideal. In order to make sense of them, we need to re-educate our eyes. 1) Joe Moran

Soft Estate is the term used by the Highways Agency to describe the grass verges and other natural habitats that line our motorways and trunk roads (some 30,000 hectares of land nationally). Whilst roads play a major role in opening up land for access and development, their attendant verges offer a genuine refuge for wildlife and a metaphorical wilderness in the midst of intense urbanisation. These peripheral and largely unrecorded landscapes correspond to what Ignassi de Solà-Morales Rubió called ‘Terraine Vague’, areas of ‘unincorporated margins, interior islands void of activity, oversights, these areas are simply uninhabited, un-safe, un-productive…. and in terms of what they represent, …as much a critique as a possible alternative’. (2)

I began making paintings and other related works exploring these edgeland road sites several years ago because it became increasingly apparent on my regular journeys from London to Canterbury that here was a landscape full of contradictions: a threshold environment where agriculture collides with urbanisation; wild seeds blow down asphalt arteries; stems of yellow ragwort stealthily encroach on Moto car parks and the relentless din of artic trucks drowns the buzz and clicks of insects. Here was a world of contested values, already in the first bloom of economic and environmental degeneration usually seen from the bubble of a vehicle but thrown into a headlight magnifier lens of increased amplitudes when accessed on foot.

These territories represented the culturally soporific but environmentally acute: ripe for aesthetic analysis and historical contextualisation. Politics is embedded in our landscape through histories of enclosure and ownership. The new roads that make land accessible for development also close it off to the public. Land where people once walked freely is sliced away and, in a latter-day kind of enclosure, pedestrians are now forbidden. The discourses around these borderlands seemed rich for exposure and representation. Often ignored, untouched and usually unprotected, these spaces represent a new kind of frontier with an emergent sense of uniqueness.

While early tourists travelled to areas such as The Lakes to capture images of wild places, in today’s countryside uncontrolled wilderness springs up in the margins of our transport networks and the semi-derelict grid plans of industrialised corridors. These spaces, aptly described in Paul Farley and Michael Symmons-Roberts’ book Edgelands. Journeys into England’s True Wilderness form a truer picture of our experience of landscape than we might care to imagine. 3)

Our strategically marketed national parks and rural meadows are laden with contrary expectations. Road journeys often frame and inform these expectations. Photographer Fay Godwin described being ‘lured into the countryside, only to find most of it out of bounds, while we are fobbed off with substitutes like country parks and theme parks’ 4).

Eighteenth century tourists accessed these new territories equipped with a Claude Glass. Today’s traveller might see the equivalent in the gentle convex curvature of the rear view mirror as the landscape rapidly recedes then dissolves. Modern motorway design incorporates ‘Clothoid’ or transition curves, features that focus drivers’ attention so that they stay alert. These have the effect of smoothing the landscape reminiscent of eighteenth century parks, where curved carriage drives managed the experience of the landscape. Motorways arguably represent the modern equivalent of the spectacular re-sculpting of the landscape undertaken by designers such as by Capability Brown.

‘Re-educating our eyes’? At first sight, highways appear inert, empty places, devoid of any meaning or value. They are places we ‘see’ constantly as we travel around but in which we do not invest cultural value or our aesthetic regard. But on closer inspection, the wealth of unusual visual detail and strange nuances of light within their fabric often provides visual splendour. This narrow ribbon of land acts as both a frame and barrier to the vistas behind.

Quite apart from the fact that these sites are not systematically documented through their changing development, when they do have visual representation this is nearly always in film (e.g. the genre of the ‘road movie’) or from the standpoint of ‘motion’, through the car window, nearly always seen at distance, unreachable and in motion.
Photographed in the works of artists like Andrew Cross or Andreas Gursky, they are rarely recorded through painting.

For me, questions arise from how ‘still’ and yet ‘elaborated’ 5) paintings can develop from drawings, dispassionate documentary photographic sources and from the tropes of moving road film imagery: how something usually experienced either moving and with shifting parallax or conversely with snapshot brevity might be experienced as a ‘still’ but ‘continuous’ image. In this sense, a film such as Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins exploring such sites with its use of moving stills might be experienced in a similar way to painting.

Culturally what does the act of painting or representing a photographic image in paint bring to our reading of or understanding of that image, and particularly our ‘reading’ of these particular landscapes? Arguably, painting invests cultural value and emotional significance in images that in photographic form might be deadpan and forensic.

Historical

Major roads have rarely escaped political association. The large roads built by General Wade into Scotland following the 1715 Scottish Jacobite uprising provided the access for Paul Sandby’s topographical and cartographic depiction of Scottish land handed to its new ‘English’ owners. This road building paved the way for a host of ‘picturesque’ tourists. In depicting idealised country seats and associated land, Sandby was also depicting the established social order – using the recognised structure of ‘owner’ portrait set against backdrop of land owned.

These insular and stately environments provided the experimental and political backdrop to the early English Landscape tradition. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown fashioned landscapes for this set of land owning classes whose estates were artificially rusticated and re-set according to paradigms from classical painters such as Claude Lorraine and associated classical literature. Crucially, many of the ‘viewing stations’ spread around these large estates were to be seen from the privileged viewpoints of horseback or carriage whilst in motion. Arboreta normally had ‘rides’ and the whole was intended to be experienced as a kind of moving stage set. Idealised capriccio, Arcadian follies and related buildings would have sudden and surprising new ‘reveals’ as paths wove between artificial coppice and parkland and the parallax defined the space.

Similarly, as we drive, our relationship to the sculpted ravines of motorway gorges, sudden lateral views and bridges changes; different vistas open out and suddenly shut down as we move through the landscape in a speeded up way. Interrupt this commonplace visual experience by freezing a glance and you might give people a kind of laterally viewed clip of a landscape, normally encountered in milliseconds.

When the M1 was originally built, the chief architect Owen Williams, began to worry about the soporific effects of straight lines and started to introduce what is known as the ‘transition’ or ‘Clothoid’ curve, a gently accelerating arc that gradually slows momentum as well as sustaining the driver’s attention. Originally developed by a Devon County surveyor, Henry Criswell in 1937, Williams took this further, sending his son, Owen T. Williams to study Robert Moses’ suburban parkways in New York, whose meandering paths borrowed much from 18th century English landscape gardens that were diametrically opposed to the French grids. 6) These inclines, gorges and curves give credence to Carl Andre’s idea of British landscape already being ‘one vast earthwork’ 7) and Lancashire’s motorway engineer James Drake believing roads should be ‘sculpture on an exciting, grand scale, carving, moulding and adapting…earth, rock, and minerals into a finished product which must be both functional and pleasing to the eye’. 8)

Here we have the 20th century revved up equivalent of the country park, viewed at speed but with all the attendant banks and escarpments. William Gilpin once described Lakeland views from a carriage window seen in a Claude glass as ‘a succession of high coloured pictures…continually gliding before the eye’. Already landscape has been both framed and possessed. 9)

Ultimately the dislocation and ‘prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness’ 10) throws up a tension between the experience of sublimity that is heightened through motion, expanse and repetition and views which can, in some cases, be possessed.

Political

The depiction of landscape topography and the picturesque has strong roots in ideas about ownership. Uncontained, natural wilderness however, came to represent lack of control, lack of agency and with the terrible diminution experienced – obscurity. 11) This flew against the control and order of the Picturesque often ‘determined by an excess of form’. 12) A passage in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey wryly suggests how these tasteful forms masked political sensitivities such as the enclosure act. 13)

Motorway Soft Estate environments are controlled, manufactured and yet wild – qualities simultaneously like formal gardens and bunker shaped moraines. Like a latter day kind of enclosure, their very inaccessibility hints at the power of the state. Yet they are susceptible to contrary subliminal readings – lack of boundaries, trespass and unfettered nature. These verges are restricted places. We are forbidden to stop on the motorway unless we break down. Access to them is strictly controlled and often monitored by remote cameras. Like J.G Ballard’s Concrete Island, the verge is a metaphor for something forbidden and inaccessible, and once there, almost inescapable.

These ‘Island’ hyper-landscapes contain worlds in which our rapid through-transit alters our sense of scale, which is simultaneously diminished and increased. These are fragile, yet extremely self-sustaining and hard environments, changing landscapes embodying both beauty and survival.

Artist Richard Long’s professed antagonism to land ownership and to capital finds a simple outlet in that most democratic means of transport and viewing the landscape – walking. 14) It is, somewhat perversely only through walking that these road landscapes can be accessed and closely encountered. Accessing these environments embodies all the sensations of trespass and in accessing them by foot there are connections with ‘the right to roam’. Trespassing events, such as the mass trespass on Kinder Scout moors in 1932, are now again coming under legislative pressure with legal means at the disposal of landowners and managers such as ‘aggravated trespass’.

Writer and environmental campaigner, Marion Shoard describes these areas as ‘raw and rough, and rather than seeming people-friendly are often sombre and menacing, flaunting their participation in activities we do not wholly understand. They certainly do not conform to people’s idea of the picturesque by presenting a chocolate-box image, suitably composed and textural. On the contrary, they seem desolate, forsaken and unconnected even to their own elements let alone to our preferred version of human life.’ 15) We often pass them by. Again as Shoard has suggested, ‘we may not notice it, but it is here that much of our current environmental change… is taking place’ in spite of which ‘edgelands have become the lowest grade of landscape in UK landscape conservation terms.’ 16)

Celebrating these sometimes spectacular places is nevertheless tinged with unease because of the uncertain nature of their existence and the environmental questions they pose.

I would agree with Shoard’s assertion that, ‘it is time for the edgelands to get the recognition that Emily Brontë and William Wordsworth brought to the moors and mountains and John Betjeman to the suburbs. They too have their story. It is the more cogent and urgent for being the story of our age.’ 17)

© Edward Chell 2012

Endnotes

1) Moran, J. ‘On Roads. A Recent History’ published by Profile Books, London, 2009. p. 148.
2) Terrain Vague by Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió. From Davidson, C. Anyplace, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussettes, USA. 1995. pp 118 – 123.
3) Farley, Paul & Symmons-Roberts, Michael. Edgelands Journeys Into England’s True Wilderness published by Jonathan Cape, London. 2011 – pp 100 – 101.
4) Godwin, F. ‘Our Forbidden Land’ published by Jonathan Cape, London. 1990.
p 23.
5) ‘Whereas a painting needs to elaborate work to render it realist, a documentary requires self-conscious stylisation if it is not to appear realistic.’
Panse, S. ‘The Film-maker as Rückenfigur. Documentary as Painting in Alexandr Sokurov’s Elegy of a Voyage.’ Third Text, Vol 20, Issue 1, January 2006, p 13.
6) op cit., Moran. pp. 32 -34
7) Andrews, M. ‘Landscape and Western Art’ published by Oxford University Press, 1999. p. 215
8) op cit., Moran. p. 34
9) op cit., Andrews. p. 116
10) Macfarlane, R. Walking the walk, talking the talk’ p. 163. The Wild Places, published by Granta, London. p. 203
11) The obscurity described by Burke had several causes, one of which came out of succession and repetition. The artificial infinity of the modern day verge – with its soporific rhythms of posts, markers and flyovers has an equivalence here.

‘Succession and uniformity of parts, are what constitute the artificial infinite. 1. Succession; which is requisite that the parts may be continued so long and in such a direction, as by their frequent impulses on the sense to impress the imagination with an idea of their progress beyond their actual limits. 2. Uniformity; because if the figures of the parts should be changed, the imagination at every change finds a check; you are presented at every alteration with the termination of one idea, and the beginning of another; by which means it becomes impossible to continue the uninterrupted progression, which alone can stamp on bounded objects the character of infinity. It is in this kind of artificial infinity…the imagination has no rest.’

Burke, Edmund. A philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Third Edition. Published London, 1761. pp 132 – 133.(Sect IX on Succession & Uniformity) See also p 138 (Sect X1 on Infinity) and p 144. (Sect XV on Light)
12) Hazlitt, William. (1778 – 1830) On the Picturesque and the Ideal, a Fragment. See eds. Harrison ,C. Wood, P & Gaiger, J. Art in Theory 1815 -1900. published 1998 by Blackwell, p. 114
13) Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. See Oxford University Press World Classic edition, 1972. p 116
14) op cit., Andrews. p 215 – 216.
15) Shoard, Marion. Edgelands. published in Remaking the Landscape published by Profile Books. 2002.
See http://www.marionshoard.co.uk/Documents/Articles/Environment/Edgelands-Remaking-the-Landscape.pdf
16) op cit., Shoard, M
17) op cit., Shoard, M