12 minute read
Lines over time: The landscape heritage of transport
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844. © The National Gallery, London
Will Jennings looks at the complex, often conflictual, relationship between transport and landscape as it has evolved over time, finding that interventions we make today will have heritage implications that live long into the future.
On a drive in 1921 through Herefordshire, businessman Alfred Watkins suddenly noticed a series of manmade, natural, and geological landmarks lining up perfectly in the landscape. Using his camera to take a photograph, he then went home to lay a ruler over an OS map, slowly adding criss-crossing straight lines, and in doing so invented the concept of ley lines. Over the century since, his imaginary network came to absorb all kinds of counter-cultural and spiritual ways of perceiving place, but to Watkins the rigid routes indicated a prehistoric trade map created by ancient societies, connecting minerals, mines, and settlements in a time before pathways.
It is a romantic reading of landscape, if unscientific and never accepted by experts. At a time of growing private car use, he was perhaps searching for an imagined ideal of historic untouched nature, pre-Industrial Revolution and before infrastructure carved up the country. According to the RAC, in 1909 there were 53,000 licensed cars in Great Britain, rapidly rising to 2 million by 1950. The number of vehicles is now nearer to 32 million. This rising use has a huge impact on landscape, in movement, maintenance, and storage, and it is fair to say that some 400,000km of road entangling Britain is rather more visible than the ancient infrastructural routes Watkins imagined.
It began with unpaved tracks, some of prehistoric origins, connecting tribal areas, offering defence routes, and smoothing passage through the landscape upon paths beaten hard through regular use. There is evidence that some early settlements contained an early act of urbanism with stone pathways, and in 2011 an archaeological dig in a Shropshire quarry revealed an Iron Age cambered and metalled road from the first century BCE, suggesting there may have been engineered roads through rural landscapes.
It was only after the Roman invasion of 43 CE that the green and pleasant land became one also of hard surfacing and networks of movement, with over 3,200km of roads linking ports, cities, and fortifications, many of which such as Fosse Way and Watling Street are now partially buried under today’s system. In the 2009 book And Did Those Feet, Charlie Connelly retrod important routes of British and Irish history, but found that the modern network sometimes not only covered up but also prevented slower and historical passage. When treading the Roman road Boudicca likely took from Venta Icenorum (Norwich) towards Camulodunum (Colchester), now the A140 and A12, his walk ended prematurely:
I found myself walking among muddy ruts and grassy clumps, jagged branches tearing at my clothes, as I stepped around unidentifiable lumps of metal, bottles and disused road detritus.
“Many deem [motorways] to be too mundane, ubiquitous, characterless, and recent to be of architectural importance or to have heritage value,” writes Peter Merriman in his chapter on motorways and landscape in The Good, the Bad and the Unbuilt: Handling the Heritage of the Recent Past. A Human Geographer at Aberystwyth University specialising in transport, Merriman raises questions around whether junctions, bridges, service stations, and even sinuous routes carved through rolling hills are worthy of recognition and preservation.
Landscape architects of course had a large role to play in the development of this post-war infrastructure, as past President of the Landscape Institute Sylvia Crowe put it at the time: “Before the war landscape design was confined almost entirely to the creation of gardens and parks […]. Gradually this is changing: the pressure of population, transport and economics is upsetting the balance of great areas of landscape, and it is evident that positive design is needed to restore them to a state of balance.” But while Historic England and the Twentieth Century Society increasingly raise awareness around industrial heritage, such as recent campaigns around power stations, gasholders, and cooling towers, modern transport infrastructure is not often up for preservation conversation.
We know that transport infrastructure can contain real moments of beauty and cultural importance that is embedded into the story of Britain. The canal network is now a celebrated scenic, relaxing, touristic experience, far removed from the grime and grind it once was, with the picturesque Caen Hill’s locks in Wiltshire now found on t-shirts, mugs, and jigsaws. Turner’s painting of the Great Western Railway captures the nostalgia and threat of transitioning into the modern age within a great swirl of brushwork. The 1890s Glenfinnan Viaduct’s sweep across the top of Loch Shiel had always been iconic, but with a starring role across the Harry Potter films it became celebrity infrastructure which welcomes the luxury Belmond Royal Scotsman.
Much transport infrastructure deemed ‘beautiful’ has a patina of history, connecting us to a romanticised version of the past – one cleansed, depoliticised, and easily commodified. Railway arches, once an ecosystem of mechanics, recyclers, and upholsterers, are now polished and repurposed as craft beer, coffee, and dining destinations. Docks which once connected to enslaved islands and trading partners are now sites of luxury housing, universities, and financial business. Bits of the network Beeching broke are now reimagined as heritage railways.
Perhaps modern infrastructure hasn’t settled into the landscape long enough to pick up such romance, but this might change as older generations imbue childhood and distant memories into post-war places. Such infrastructure is beginning to seep into the cultural landscape: Jen Orpin‘s miniatures of motorway bridges, often unremarkable architecturally, but truly sculptural when frozen into her postcard format; Mark Leckey’s 1:1 model of an M53 motorway bridge in the galleries of Tate Britain as a space of remembered teenage gathering; and the generation of ravers who gathered at 1980s service stations waiting to head to a rural party location are now in their sixties.
These transport landscapes contain social and cultural heritage, but as Merriman points out: “motorways are important, strategic spaces in the economic and social lives of millions of Britons, and in an age where the public (and hence politicians) care about congestion and traffic flow, heritage practitioners will have to work hard to ensure that motorway ‘improvement’ schemes do not result in the widespread destruction of important structures and features.”
The kind of opposition to transport infrastructure as witnessed with HS2 is not new. Early railways faced opposition from farmers concerned that smoke would destroy crops, from landed gentry angry at the impact on foxhunting, and from a threatened canal industry. In his poem, On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway, Wordsworth asked, “Is there no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?” and while Ruskin wasn’t too upset about rail’s physical impact, he disliked the speed of travel disconnecting us from places passed through: “All that you can know, at best, of the country you pass is its geological structure and general clothing.”
Having to go through regular planning and with well-publicised campaigns opposing how it sits in nature, especially through the Chilterns, much of HS2’s route is culverted or tunnelled so it won’t be seen in or as part of landscape, also meaning – which might please Ruskin – users won’t be able to see the magical views of natural and manmade vistas.
“If you go back to Brunel‘s Great Western, his view was that it was to be celebrated, not hidden,” Glenn Howells, director of his eponymous architectural firm, tells Landscape, “where bridges were opportunities to celebrate the synthesis of architecture, engineering, and landscape.” Howells is involved with HS2 through the design of public realm where 65,000 people a year will leave Curzon Street Station to continue their Birmingham journey on foot, bike, and public transport. Working collaboratively with Grimshaw, and landscape architects Grant Associates, Howells are aiming to stitch the new station district to wider work undertaken through recent pedestrianisation schemes in the city centre, and a Central Birmingham 2040 urban framework for the city council. “Our work in Birmingham is about re re-establishing older, smaller, human-size connections which don‘t need machines to take you around,” Howells says.
Other than the potential risk of damaging ancient archaeological sites and chalk geology, this is also a point of opposition to the Stonehenge tunnel. The view from the A303 towards the ancient site is perhaps one of the most incredible views any driver will ever experience and, as a palimpsest of man’s relationship to a particular place, there is an argument that the presence of the road is of critical importance in understanding the site. Just as the Angel of the North is a gateway moment for those heading north on the A1, so too Stonehenge could be considered not solely as a sculptural moment in the landscape but one intrinsically part of a wider, complex reading of place –including the A303, which is a gateway to a West Country holiday for so many adults and children.
“Infrastructure is more than just A-to-B; it defines a generation in terms of how it makes provision for the future, which we seem unable to do at the moment,” Howells again muses, leading to the question of what future transport infrastructure will look like and how it will relate to, or be led by, landscape. As we emerge from the modern into the Anthropocene age, one approach will undoubtedly be to unstitch some of what we built over the last century, but that we now realise has brought environmental or social damage.
When we think of the words ‘transport’ and ‘infrastructure’, our mind immediately thinks of big lines in the landscape shuttling humans and cargo across increasingly large distances. Such infrastructure will likely continue to have a place in our world, but the heritage of the future demands that we find better ways of doing it: See Amsterdam-based VenhoevenCS and DS landschaparchitecten’s ‘Butterfly Effect’ research, for example, which proposes a web running over linear transport networks, generating renewable solar energy while also creating migration corridors for insects. Proposed for the UNESCOlisted Hollandse Waterlinie heritage landscape, Venhoeven CS’ Ton Venhoeven says, “They are protected lands, so UNESCO will be very critical – it’s like the Dutch Stonehenge!”
But balancing the trade-offs of a given site is a critical aspect of landscape practice, and neither the difficulty nor demand of this work will abate any time soon.
More inspiration can be found in Seoul, where the Cheonggye Freeway was deconstructed to create a pedestrian path and re-opened stream, with MVRDV working with landscape architect Ben Kuipers to establish 24,000 potted trees and plants upon a former highway interchange. Meanwhile, a shortlisted entrant to the current Davidson Prize proposes a co-living project for Yorkshire’s now-closed Robin Hood Airport, with team member Eric Guibert introducing a landscape scheme of rewilded land and the growing of building materials. A look back at the 2016 Venice Biennale would also recall Norman Foster’s mudbrick droneport, a technology that at first might be useful for last-stage deliveries or connecting to rural or remote communities, but in time perhaps may develop into cargo and human transport and reduce our infrastructural impact on the ground altogether.
At a time of great transition, landscape architects and project collaborators will be critical to the ongoing reorganising of transport infrastructure, not just to conceal or blend infrastructure into place but to ensure that any development also brings natural, social, cultural, and ecological value. And while big lines in the landscape may be here for some time, the restructuring of city streets, creation of green infrastructure and cycle lanes, and ‘LTN-ing’ of suburban areas (as witnessed so well in Paris and now slowly developing in the UK) also continues apace.
As we decommission, reconfigure, and build new transport infrastructure, planners and designers should remain mindful of the slow pace of heritage compared to the high speed of change. Landscapes take time to root in ecology and place, and while it is perhaps no surprise to find short-term opposition and anger to schemes of such scale, future generations will be the ones to use, live with, and create stories about what is built today.
Will Jennings is a writer across art and architecture, editor of online platform recessed.space, and teaches at UCL and the University of Greenwich.
