I’ve recently been trying to figure out how much time I’ve spent on motorways since I moved back to the UK when I was 19. The number will never be reached, but based on some calculations, my estimate is around 2000 hours, or, more terrifyingly, 83 days. Between driving to work and back when I was a teacher, to clocking up well over a hundred coach journeys to play gigs between Manchester and London and every other city in the UK that Megabus and the National Express can take you,1 to then driving to those gigs no longer at the mercy of coaches, to just going places, I’ve not only amassed some serious hours—and probably shortened my life due to stress—but felt as connected and alienated from humanity as I think it’s possible to feel in a group situation.
They’re weird places, motorways, and undoubtedly brilliant at what they do. The parkour of driving, getting you from point A to point B as fast as possible without actually seeing the area you’re going through. And though there is a unique beauty to the expanses of flatland they cover, they never compare to the sites and oddities that A and B roads have to offer. Not to mention how they poison the mind against anything other than conquering points A and B with lightning speed, something I was guilty of until my second speeding ticket, when I realised that even though going fast is fun and efficient, it destroys your connection with the world around you, and more than anything, makes you an insufferable and impatient cunt on the road.2
And yes, it is true that you get to see some very funny names listed on those beautiful blue motorway signs, but other than that you don’t really know much other than the fact you hop on the M56 southwards, onto the M6, then the M1 and into the bowels of London (that is if you don’t go from the M6 to M40 before an orbital jaunt on the M25). And what have you seen? The services, some roadworks, and weather depending, some wide open vistas, maybe even a nice sunset too (that you complain about because it’s a nightmare to drive whenever the sun shows off). You’ve hardly seen any towns at all, and when you do they’re a blur on the motorway’s side. Or, God forbid, you get diverted and have to pass through Britain proper, making you resent places like Leighton Buzzard til kingdom come.
Motorways then, good and bad. Efficient but depersonalising.
There is, however, a deeply personalising aspect to motorways: the motorway bridge. For me, standing on any one of these drastically heightens the sonder you feel at the wheel or with your face pressed against the window. The sound of all the passing cars drowning out your thoughts and the environment. Or at nighttime when it’s silent and only the occasional car passes beneath you, faces obscured at 70 miles an hour. Who are they? Where are they going? What sort of life do they lead? That sort of stuff.
We’re particularly spoilt in Glasgow for these bridges, since the M8 literally cuts through the heart of the city. And while this is terrible for the population’s lungs, hinders the introduction of trams and other public transport improvements, no doubt multiplying the cold individualism baked into the heart of the motorway: that Americanised, ultra-capitalist transport method of the modern individual, the multitude of bridges are still something I find myself incredibly grateful for.
One of my favourites is a little south of the city, just behind Pollok County park. Not being in the city centre less people cross it, and as such you can spend more time looking out without worrying that people might think you’re going to kill yourself.3 It’s particularly Ballardian, which I know is a tired point of reference, but Jim really did nail the wider cultural upheaval that motorways were a part of in mid-to-late 20th century Britain. And—as you can see in the following photo—the juxtaposition of old barn, farmland, and treelined country park with steel, concrete and asphalt really is like something he would have written about from his suburban shelter in Shepperton.
The other night I helped a friend pick up some chairs from a workshop. We got caught in traffic there and back (on the M8 and M74), adding another hour-and-a-half to my estimated 2000 hours of motorway travel, and as we sat having tea and biscuits with the man who repaired them (who might possibly be the nicest man on earth) the conversation fell onto motorways and motorway bridges specifically. The carpenter reckoned that both fall into the same history as things like the Nazca lines and pyramids—megastructures testifying not only a desire to leave our mark on the environment, but simply to make. Things that will leave indelible marks on the earth for generations to come, no matter what catastrophes loom.
This reminded me of a Will Self story discussing just that: future humans, following some catastrophic event, rebuilding societies and seeing the remnants of the motorway system as a ‘monument to a dead culture.’ The main character, an obscure motorway scholar who desires to be buried in a concrete mausoleum on the M40 (Junction 5: Stokenchurch), hopes that in some distant future, due to the ‘similarites in construction between my tomb and the great chamber tombs of Ireland and the Orkneys,’ that he will be discovered and taken as an example of a posited ‘continuous motorway culture lasting some 7000 years,’ based on his contention that ‘phenomena such as Silsbury Hill and the Avebury stone circle can be best understood as, respectively, an embankment and a roundabout.’
As the conversation snaked around the engineering feats of motorways and their bridges, my friend brought up our other friend’s theory that those same future societies might take us for giants, this being the only way to make sense of such massive structures in a post-collapse world. I’m not sure if this friend based that theory on The Ruin, an 8th or 9th century elegy (one of the oldest poems in our language), in which the narrator wanders through what is presumed to be the city of Bath, at the time lying in a state of decay and disrepair after the Romans abandoned it three centuries earlier. But whether he did or didn’t, the similarity is striking. The Ruin’s narrator discusses the collapsing stone structures left behind by ‘the Giants,’ and imagines the city and its people when it was inhabited—‘the noise of the multitude, many a meadhall full of festivity’—until some unknown fate befell them.
Whether the narrator literally meant that he thought the city had been built by giants (Roman construction far exceeding that of the local tribes even three centuries on), or if it was an honorific for an obviously once mighty culture, the poem nonethless remains ‘the first of many Anglo Saxon meditations on old stones.’ A tradition carried on now as we think about those driving up and down the country and predict how motorways will be percieved in years to come. All those people, all those lives. Who was it that made them? Who was it that used them? And it’s this sonder not only of the present, but the future too, that is so soothing as you stand on a motorway bridge, staring out at the grey, awaiting its fate as a ruin. With someone perhaps, thinking back on you.
One of which, after a gig in Brixton, resulted in me getting intensely sick after drinking Megabus tap water out of sheer necessity (the band drank all the drinks we had after making me sprint up Buckingham Palace Road at 11pm to hold up the bus as it readied to leave Victoria). I wrote and scrapped a column about that experience because these 75 words sum it up better than those 800 did. Stupidity begets pain.
And then really it’s only efficient in an illusory way. If you do the maths (T=D/S) it turns out that unless you’re driving blisteringly fast, the temporal gains are negligable.
A passerby once asked if I was ok while staring out at the road ahead and the cars beneath. While this was undoubtedly a very caring act, my paranoia surrounding people’s perception of what is for me a very peaceful and grounding habit, has drastically increased.