Keep it clean
DESIGN STEPHEN GARDINER
If you go to Oxford from London, particularly when the sun is shining, you must take the M40. The last stretch of the High Wycombe by-pass has been recently completed, and it starts at Beaconsfield. It seems to have been an absurdly long time building. For about eighteen months I have watched, tantalised, over various journeys, the construction of the viaduct that rakes across the top of the town's suburbs, and evidence—piles of earth, trees cut down—of the road's painfully slow advance as it hacked its way through a wood along the top of a hill. But it was worth the hard work, the mess, all one's feelings of anticipa- tion and frustration when the opening of the road was delayed, week after week, by frac- tures in the tarmac, renewed bouts of drilling and the elimination of the_ odd hole. Now the finished motorway unpeels like a dream, as one had hoped it would, and in fact far more beautifully than it was possible to imagine. Half an hour is knocked off a visit to Oxford, the frightful Wycombe traffic jam forgotten and, humming through the undulat- ing and immaculate tall green cuttings, topped with trees and a blue sky on a good day, this great bending road makes one of the most sensual high-speed experiences to be had, any- where.
Motorway imagery succeeds on various levels. At its best, fresh and strange, this kind of Toad cuts loose into empty country one has never seen before. The large generous scale belongs to vast spaces, and this is why the sudden descent off the Chiswick flyover into open country is so startling and exciting: the congestion of London, the chimneys and office blocks and back-to-back houses are exchanged at one stroke for the wide-angle landscape of the M4. On a motorway one sees the country in a completely different way. Obviously the viewpoint is much the same as before. It is the scale that has changed. Because the hedges and all the domestic detail have gone, the road and the driver become a part of a very much larger picture where distances are immense. An ordinary piece of farmland in the home counties, therefore, may have a momentary likeness to the Yorkshire moors or to somewhere in France.
But the intimacy one associates with the English landscape is as evident as ever. Best in uneven contours, like the M40 and M6, motorways are built as far as possible on the flat and so produce sections through ground formations that in the past have only been seen from railways. But, unlike the window of a train which gives a one-sided picture, the car windscreen has an uninterrupted range of
the whole oncoming scene—a road burrowing between banks or breaking out into fields—
undisturbed by obstructions like roundabouts and traffic lights. Lastly, the graphics are ex- cellent: someone has had the sense to choose the right blue and a real white for colour and the diagrams that point out directions like fingers, the arrows, the warning stripes and the plain lettering are beautifully done.
All this is good. Perhaps one misses the in- teresting treatment of the grass reserve in the centre that is sometimes found on trunk roads, when the two carriageways part company for yards at a time to avoid huge clumps of trees, or the changes of level that make traffic miracu- lously disappear from view, but it is doubtful if the results would really balance the econo- mics, or whether they would suit the discipline of motorway design. At least the lanes are wide—French motorways seem very narrow by comparison—and the effects are satisfying because they are functional and natural. With a fast car and some open country, nothing much should go wrong.
But, of course, it can and does. The motor- way is as vulnerable as anything else to all the usual mistakes that have ruined practically everything we possess, from villages to cities. The most objectionable attachments are bridges—particularly irritating because they are obvious, constant and dissimilar in pattern. And they are almost always clumsy, old- fashioned affairs that look as though they have never heard of a modern motorway and, still less, of the pre-stressed concrete of which they are usually made. Powerful enough, appar- ently, to support a six-storey block of flats, they must be extremely expensive and make a very simple problem looks absurdly complicated. A bridge is a method of communication from one bank to another, and no more than that —a lesser element passing over a greater, and should be expressed as such with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of economy and elegance so that the flow of the road continues without any interruption: it could all be done with a single span—seventy feet is nothing these days—and there is a footbridge at the begin- ning of the MIO which tries that out, after the style of Maillard, in tapered concrete.
Lighting is yet another threat and one which, since the French have discovered that it reduces accidents, is likely to become universal. In that case a substitute will have to be found for
i the tall lamp-standards that spoil we country by day. This is surely possible on some such lines as, say, the strip-lights at car height de- signed by Nervi, leaving Rome; and other items come to mind—filling stations, restaurants . . . There will be a lot of work for really good--architects and, since the Green Paper just 'published says that £25,500 million are to be spent on new motorways, the Govern- ment should keep a sharp eye on design. These roads may exist as an experience only for those who are on them but for that alone the metsage is plain: keep it pure, keep it clean.
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