Just north of Winchester, in the south of England, the A34 cuts through a group of Bronze Age barrows or burial mounds. The small grassy heaps sit on each side of the busy dual carriageway, so close to the traffic that the tussocky edge of one of these structures seems to be shaved by the road surface. Travelling at speed, the majority of road users may not notice these man made bumps in the landscape, and if they do, they are unlikely to connect them to the ancient burial practices of which they are evidence. The proximity of the road to these earth works – the uncomfortable montage of tarmac and grass, reveals something of the complex relationship between the ancient and the modern, and processes of preservation and development; a relationship which lies just under the surface of everyday non-metropolitan experience.
2.1 Burial mound seen from A34, 2014.
This chapter explores how these tensions are played out through experiences of driving in the countryside. It is divided into four parts, each taking its lead from a different visual resource. First it examines how road building and increased automobility have contributed to a blurring of the boundaries between country and city, looking at the idea of ‘subtopia’ as expressed in Iain Nairn’s publication Outrage (1955). Second, through analysis of 3 hours from here (2004), a film by artist Andrew Cross, it questions the idea of the ‘non-place’ in relation to a non-metropolitan perspective on motorways. This section also attempts to re-think motorways as non-metropolitan places, rather than urban enclaves, and in so doing, recovers the experience of speed and technology as one which can belong to the realm of the rural. The uncomfortable relationship between speed, technology and the countryside is further explored in the third section which centres on how driving in the countryside has been conceptualised in the renowned magazine Country Life. The chapter finishes with an examination of how the seemingly contradictory forces of development and preservation, technology and nature, speed and stillness are interwoven through the pages of the Shell County Guides produced in the 1930s.
The A34 was the road on which architectural journalist Ian Nairn travelled from Southampton to Carlisle and onwards into the Highlands – a journey which he documented in a special edition of Architectural Review in 1955 called Outrage.1 At this time the A34 was the major North-South route through the country, taking Nairn through the southern counties of Hampshire and Oxfordshire, into the industrial Midlands and up to the North West coast through Lancashire and the Lake District.2 The rationale behind the journey was to document the many and various ways that the British countryside was, in Nairn’s eyes, being consumed by agents of modern development. He begins the issue with an aerial view of an unidentified stretch of countryside, predominantly featuring small fields bordered by hedgerows and wooded areas, the scene presents the countryside as largely uninhabited with just three visible properties some distance from each other. With this image he overlays the text:
This is the first and last view of rural England to be seen in these pages. It is just a reminder of what we are squandering with all the means at our disposal, confident that there will always be some left over. What follows proves that this is a criminally feckless illusion, and that we are in fact obliterating the whole countryside (Nairn 1955: p. 364).
This rhetoric of loss is familiar from Lowenthal’s (1994) analysis of the narratives that are constructed around the countryside (see Chapter 1). However, rather than the erosion of footpaths, the invasion of alien species or the ruination of historic buildings, Nairn’s outrage is directed towards spread of a phenomenon he terms ‘subtopia’, which he describes as:
A mean and middle state, neither town nor country, an even spread of abandoned aerodromes and fake rusticity, wire fences, traffic roundabouts, gratuitous notice-boards, car-parks and Things in Fields. It is a morbid condition which spreads both ways from suburbia, out into the country, and back into the de-vitalised hearts of towns, so that the most sublime backgrounds, urban or rural, English or foreign, are now seen only over a foreground of casual and unconsidered equipment, litter and lettered admonitions – Subtopia is the world of universal low-density mess (Nairn 1955: p. 373).3
This quote complicates the narrative that has become familiar throughout this research: that signs of modernity spread out from the cities into the country. This is a problematic story because it casts the rural as the victim of development, rather than acknowledging the complexities of rural experiences of modernity. Nairn however sees the origin of this development as the suburbs and the movement as lateral in both directions: into the countryside and back into the inner city. Whether the suburbs can really be seen as productive of subtopia in this way is debatable, however Nairn is really focusing on the aesthetic of subtopia which he identifies as being of the suburbs – banal, ill designed, utilitarian, and standardised. What is particularly interesting here is that he identifies as a product of subtopia a state that is ‘neither town nor country’.4 In this way subtopia alerts us to the ways in which the modern developments charted by Nairn, have complicated the distinctions between town and country. Roads are agents in this process in that they join town to country, and as is argued below, development spreads along roads blurring the boundaries of brown and green field. In addition the new arterial roads of this time made commuting an option for many more people, significantly changing the demographic of rural places (Rogers 1989). In this way using the term non-metropolitan to think about places that feel unable to qualify as ‘rural enough’ – neither town nor country, becomes particularly relevant.
The term is clearly an amalgamation of suburbia and utopia, neatly making Nairn’s point that the mediocre architecture and attitudes of suburbia were being valorised as the desirable norm (a movement towards utopian living) and were multiplying accordingly.5 However, it is also interesting to note how subtopia relates to the other meanings of the word utopia. Philosopher Louis Marin sees as central to the definition of utopia, that it operates in between established dialectical or oppositional forces:
It edges its way between the contraries and thus is the discursive expression of the neutral (defined as ‘neither one, nor the other’ of the contraries). Here is one example: More’s Utopia is neither England nor America, neither the Old nor the New World; it is the in-between of the contradiction at the beginning of the sixteenth century of the Old and New Worlds (Marin 1984: p. xiii).
In the case of subtopia it could be asserted that it is in between the contraries of the country and the city, and provides a third and different formulation, a way of acknowledging a space of possibility that is neither of these things. While in Nairn’s formulation subtopia is a warning call rather than an aspiration, it does provide a vocabulary for articulating the increasingly modern experience of in-betweeness. Working with More’s Utopia ([1516] 1986) Marin discusses the geographic instability of the island, noting that its latitude and longitude are never satisfactorily revealed, writing: ‘U-topia, ou-topia, no-place’ (Marin 1984: p. 85).6 There are links to be made here with the notion of the non-metropolitan, a geographical nonsense, a relational term, but one necessary for imagining and articulating certain forms of experience that happen as a product of being in-between the old and the new, ancient and modern, preservation and development, and speed and stillness.
Subtopia is used by Nairn to refer to many architectural characteristics of modern development but he was chiefly concerned by the growth of low density housing developments which extend the footprint of cities and towns and had started over the two decades previous to his publication, to attach themselves to villages. Many protests against the development of new housing specifically identified the building of new roads or the improvement of old ones as being a cause of a new ill, termed ribbon development. This refers to the practice of building single strips of new houses and shops alongside a main road. This was seen as an inefficient use of space as building in strips, rather than in cul-de-sacs for example, extended the foot print of habitation further out into the countryside. Books edited by Clough Williams-Ellis, a founding member of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), such as England and the Octopus (1928) and Britain and Beast (1937), both contain various tirades against ribbon development. The front cover of the former showing the green and pleasant land being invaded by the sinuous tentacles of an enormous pink octopus. The eight legged brute was supposed to represent the modern development of roads and houses spreading through the land, as was the less specific ‘beast’.7 Moran notes that in many ways certain battles against this spread or ‘sprawl’ as it is often called had been won in the decade before Nairn’s publication, with the introduction of the Town and Country Planning Act in 1947 which advocated much stricter controls on new development (Moran 2009: p. 137). However, even in the 1970s developments of this type persisted as a cause for concern, with Edward Hyams in The Changing Face of Britain citing increasing car use and rural availability of electricity as the chief reason for the continued popularity of ribbon developments (Hyams 1977: pp. 210–15).
For Nairn, however, the concept of subtopia was about more than road building and its associated developments. He asserts that a subtopic landscape represented the spread of a sort of sameness throughout the land; he feared that the country would become one large indistinguishable suburb of itself, and worse than that it would be ugly. Nairn identified this problem of sameness as a product of standardisation and economic expediency. He identifies various everyday, taken for granted details such as wire fences, television aerials, pylons and road signs, as agents of subtopia. One full page is given over to a photomontage of lampposts (Figure 2.2), which he uses to argue that rather than thinking about the introduction of lampposts into an area as a project which requires a sensitivity to the existing environment and as such should be approached on a case by case basis, he asserts that these ‘diagrams of progress’ (telephone/electricity poles, lampposts etc.) are ‘treated by their authors as if they were invisible’ (Nairn 1955: p. 317). He continues:
That is just what all these aren’t: the reason – the usual one in matters of England’s appearance – is a combination of out-of-hand standardisation and expediency. Standardisation – 25 foot poles on main roads, 15 foot poles on minor roads produces fittings of incredible size well above the roof line. Expediency provides the concrete – steel shortage – and the clumsy designs … They stamp any scene with their apathetic pattern (Nairn 1955: p. 372).
Such standardisation is a notion that Lefebvre saw as key to an understanding of modern everyday life. Philip Wander writing in response to Lefebvre, demonstrates how our everyday relationships with the world are constructed through such standardisation driven by bureaucratic (state) and economic (capitalist) expediency.8 Wander describes this situation with an example that speaks to some aspects of the outrage felt by Nairn:
The shape and content of our lives is the product of a number of decisions in which we do not participate and about which we may or may not be aware. The building in which I live is the product of negotiations between builders, environmentalists, and bankers: its cost, which is a product of interest rates, a depression in the construction industry, and the efforts made by unions to preserve jobs, as well as its shape – the kind of building materials used, where it sits on the lot, its relation to the sun at mid-day. The nature surrounding me? Every shrub is planned, its selection influenced by what is planted on the freeways and in front of office buildings (this establishes a fashion and lowers the cost of the plants involved). The sky, the azure blue of romantic poems, is laced with wires the telephone company, electric utilities, and lumber interests did not wish to bury (Wander 2009 [1984]: viii–ix).
2.2 Iain Nairn, Lamp Standards, from Outrage, 1955. Courtesy of RIBA Library Photographs Collection and the Estate of Ian Nain.
Wander’s analysis shows that it is possible to see the spread of this subtopian sameness, not only as a product of ill considered design, but as a product of the many bureaucratic and economic forces structuring the everyday. One of the illustrations by Gordon Cullen which feature throughout the book, which could easily be an observation of many locations, both rural and urban today, eloquently summarises these processes. It shows the telephone wires that it cost too much to bury; the generic municipal planting schemes devised to be most efficient in terms of cost of plants and maintenance, whilst still communicating a sufficient amount of civic pride to attract investment/tourism and to reduce disaffection and crime; the jumbled road signs, soon to become a product of standardisation across the country, might point to a one-way system implemented by local government as necessary for the increased road users to negotiate streets designed for minimal traffic;9 the tree in the centre has been shorn of most of its limbs, to eliminate leafy branches obscuring traffic signs and advertisements and then shedding onto the pavements necessitating clearance; space becomes a product sold to firms for advertising in order for them to sell more things to us; and what we do with the things we’ve bought once we’ve consumed them also becomes a municipal problem with a municipal answer: the litter bin.
While all of this is eminently recognisable, something that is lacking in Nairn’s account is the resident’s perspective – the actual experience of living in places he feels are touched by subtopia. It is significant that it is not the arterial road that is the agent of subtopia but the ribbon development that follows it, for the road is key to Nairn’s perspective on the countryside which is very much that of a visitor. He refers to the countryside as scenery, view and background, presumably accessed through the car window. We saw Nairn begin his book with an image of the uninhabited countryside, this is his ideal, the rural as an empty space available for the rest and recuperation of the urbanite. He asserts that the duty of the ‘man-in-the-street’ is ‘two-fold: on the one hand, to bring to the highest pitch of effective life his man-made environment – the “city” – on the other, to put limits to it as enable him to keep contact with the wild – the “country”’ (Nairn 1955: p. 367). This idea is tied up with cultural imaginary of the countryside as possessing health-giving properties, a notion that is seen in the idealised body of the rural labourer found in late nineteenth century paintings (Holt 2003: p. 6), the idea of the ‘Organic English Body’ described by Matless (1998: pp. 136–70), and the idea that the countryside is morally improving (Joad 1937).
Nairn’s exploration of Subtopia usefully complicates the distinctions between town and country, however rather than productively suggesting an alertness to the different ways in which modernity is experienced in these zones, he instead sees subtopia as a leveller of experience, an agent of ill designed sameness homogenising the nation. In the next section we see how Nairn’s predictions of sameness, or loss of identity have been played out in the contemporary landscape with an examination of the work of Andrew Cross and what it reveals about the non-metropolitan as non-place.
The latest homage to the A34 has been made by artist Andrew Cross in his film 3 hours from here (2004). The film documents a journey from Southampton to Manchester, from the cab of a heavy goods vehicle. Using a fixed camera which periodically alternates between a shot of the view through the windscreen and view through the passenger window, and with only ambient sound, a somnambulistic passivity pervades this visual and durational record of the state of the nation characterised by repetitive similitude.
The starting point for this journey is Southampton’s docks. The film begins with a shot of a big yellow crane manoeuvring an anonymous freight container which we assume is to be our cargo. The choice of Southampton as a point from which to begin is a reference to Nairn’s trip and perhaps more famously to J.B. Priestley’s An English Journey (1934), in which the author made a tour of the nation visiting rural areas and industrial towns to report on a country that he perceived to be ‘in crisis’ (Drabble 1997: p. 7).10 Southampton, it seems has been a popular place to leave:
it had no existence in my mind as a real town, where you could buy and sell, and bring up children; it existed only as a muddle of railway sidings, level crossings, customs houses and dock sheds: something to have done with as soon as possible (Priestley 1977 [1934]: p. 27).11
2.3 Andrew Cross, 3 hours from here (an English Journey), 2004.
Almost 50 years later Cross’ film might be seen to function as a further instalment to Nairn’s Outrage. However, rather than documenting the spread of the kind of residential subtopia of low density housing and ill conceived municipal street furniture predicted by Nairn, it instead records the spread of a different type of development, that of the network of motorways and their accompanying ‘Big Shed’ warehouse complexes, which in the years following the publication of Nairn’s book have become so much a part of the English landscape.12 While Nairn’s book predicted the ruination of the small towns and villages that he passed through in 1955, he failed to foresee that the most major development in the coming decades would mean that these places would no longer offend the eye of the motorist as they have been in large part literally bypassed by new roads circumnavigating awkward town and village centres.13
Cross’ film reveals a network of sameness, a complex of wiry roads knotted together by roundabouts. Mile after mile of black-top and non-descript green embankment mean that any orientation through distinctive landmarks becomes impossible. All navigation is delegated to the standardised and highly coded road signs. Travelling in this way becomes abstract and placeless, roads are numbered rather than named, they skirt the edges of towns and cities in a state of unbelonging. Huge and abundant, blue and white hoardings provide a shopping list of places, their only meaning derived from their relative distances. When you are on the road, that’s where you are: on the road and in between, ‘I’m on the A34 between Newbury and Oxford’ one might yell into a mobile phone.
The abdication of place, the settling for the state of in between, situates motorways and fast roads more generally in the realm of the non-place, a concept articulated most notably by the French anthropologist Marc Augé (1995).14 For Augé the non-place is a product of supermodernity, a kind of hyped up, speeded up version of the modern where hollowness and disconnection are symptomatic of the accelerated processes of late stage capitalism and global being, ‘If place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (Augé 1995: pp. 77–8).
Augé sees non-places as essentially transitional spaces through which people and goods move on their way to somewhere else, places like airport departure lounges, supermarkets and of course, motorways (Augé 1995: p. 79). These locations appear to have no history or make no connection with their histories. In the case of new roads and supermarkets, it is often difficult to remember what occupied the space before they emerged, as if their manifestation has conjured a new piece of land into existence, their construction often appearing to seamlessly alter the landscape making it difficult to feel as if they have not always been there.15 The ahistoricity of the non-place means they are entirely spaces of the present, in which time can seem suspended, or at least different, for example the black and orange roadside display units which hang like rectangular thunder clouds over sections of the motorway now claim time for their own purposes, conflating it with distance and progress along the road ‘J9 for A34, 12 miles – 10 minutes’ they might say.
Non-places offer few opportunities for human to human interaction, an individual entering a non-place remains an individual, few or no connections are made with others. While driving on motorways a few signals such as the flashing of lights or intricate indication routines represent a kind of impoverished communication, however actual interaction with other drivers is to be avoided at all costs, out of fear that an accidental catching of the eye might invite an act of ‘road rage’.16 Identity might be recorded in a non-place, but one always remains essentially anonymous. At airports passports are scanned, in supermarkets payment cards are inserted into chip and pin devices, on the road CCTV and speed cameras register number plates. However, this numerical identity does not displace anonymity between other occupants of the non-place, this impersonal identity is known only to the state – registered on a giant database.
The non-place operates through signs and messages rather than human interactions.
Orders given by illuminated over head signs are changed remotely by an unseen hand, information is communicated silently and impersonally based not on your individual journey or destination but on a system of standardised measurements and road signs. This situation is made particularly evident in a startling moment in Cross’ film when after around an hour of silence punctuated only by the low level sound of the road and the occasional tick of the lorry’s indicator, the driver stops at the M6 toll road and a few words of greeting from the gate operator seem to glimmer like coins thrown out into the abyssal grey of the motorway non-place.
In his essay ‘Notes on a New Town’, Lefebvre comments on how the newly built town of Mourenx has been planned to function through these impersonal forms of communication, becoming reduced to a set of signs:
Mourenx has taught me many things. Here objects wear their social credentials: their function … When an object is reduced to nothing but its own function, it is also reduced to signifying itself and nothing else; there is virtually no difference between it and a signal, and to all intents and purposes a group of these objects become a signalling system. As yet there are not many traffic lights in Mourenx. But in a sense the place is already nothing but traffic lights (Lefebvre 1995 [1962]: p. 119).
Lefebvre wonders if the potential residents of Mourenx will obey these signs, will they shop in the places signed as shopping centres, ask for advice in the planned advice bureau? He asks, is this functionalist world of signs capable of creating the ideal community, or is it more likely to harden all spontaneity, and result in deadening boredom?
Boredom is certainly the dominant characteristic of Cross’ filmic account of motorway travel, with hours of indistinguishable landscaping punctuated with the occasional sign communicating the rules of the road. However, Augé takes this idea further arguing that our relationship with the landscape through which we are travelling is reduced to a text of signs and symbols:
it is the texts planted along the wayside that tell us about the landscape and make its secret beauties explicit. Main roads no longer pass through towns, but lists of their notable features … appear on big signboards nearby. In a sense the traveller is absolved of the need to stop or even look. The landscape keeps its distance, but its natural or architectural details give rise to a text … Motorway travel is thus doubly remarkable: it avoids, for functional reasons, all the principle places it takes us; and it makes comments on them (Augé 1995: p. 97).
Such texts are available to the UK motorist in the form the ubiquitous brown sign. These pieces of roadside furniture differ from the blue or green road signs which give us the factual, day-to-day tidings of place names, distances and junctions, while the brown signs have a holiday air about them. Brown signs give the impression of not belonging to the workaday world of the motorway; commuters and lorry drivers ‘look away now’ this information is for Saturdays and Sundays. Days off, made for visiting the rare delights of Birdworld, signalled by the white silhouette of a down cast cockatoo, or a museum (Doric columns, pediment and capital ‘M’), or a garden centre (six petal flower), or a theme park (carousel). However, if we follow Augé’s thinking the brown sign is not meant to entice travellers to leave the motorway at the next slip road and park up at the nearest National Trust property (sprig of oak leaves). Brown signs are not meant to enable the visit, they are meant to replace it. In this way they are precisely aimed at commuters and lorry drivers, people who will never stop, they don’t need to, the education they receive about a place through these signs is enough to placate any yearnings to turn away however momentarily from the primary modality of the road: placelessness.
Midway through Cross’s film the lorry follows a series of road signs marked DIRFT. DIRFT is emblematic of the non-place, it is no place at all, its not even a word. It is entirely appropriate that it should be confused with the word ‘drift’, redolent of a non-specific vagueness. It is a location named for an obsolete acronym – Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal. This insignia is inaccurate and in many ways meaningless, for DIRFT is placeless – adrift between Daventry and Rugby (and is really closer to Rugby), and the freight is now overwhelmingly that of road rather than rail. In Cross’ film this non-place represents zero on the milometer, it is where everything leaves from, it’s primary value is in relation to other destinations. The DIRFT website claims that:
98% of the British population (85% of the UK) can be accessed within the 4.5 hour drive time limit … due to its central location and strategic road communications (DIRFT 2010).
This geographic location – and non-places depend on their grid references – means that DIRFT has become the largest distribution centre in the UK. In Chapter 1 I referred to the non-metropolitan as a relational space, defined by its relationship to other spaces, and the everyday as a concept has also been seen as relational, filling the space of the daily when all the identifiable and specialised forms of activity has been removed, in DIRFT we find a non-metropolitan space which is entirely reliant on its relationship to elsewhere, it is not a place in itself, but is defined by its distance from other places. This floating entity is an invisible hub of the invisible rhythms of the everyday: the circulation of goods hidden in anonymous containers and the immaterial electronic transactions of international trade. It is these rhythms of the everyday that Lefebvre attempted to map in his Rhythmanalysis (2004 [1992]) project, here we see them manifested not in the major city stock exchanges, but in a non-specific part of the English countryside.
2.4 Andrew Cross, Untitled (an English Journey), 2004.
In Cross’ film the lorry becomes temporarily embroiled in a Gordian knot of roundabouts, bordered by grey warehouses so large that it is easy to confuse them with the sky. These big shed storage units are ‘containers for containers’ (Bode 2004). They are made of similar materials and share the proportions and aesthetics (multiplied hundreds of times) of the corrugated metal freight containers they house. The only distinguishing marks on the warehouse in Figure 2.4 is the giant letter D, like half a battleship’s grid references, its gargantuan presence simultaneously indicates an overwhelming fullness and a hollow emptiness.
Cross does not take us inside DIRFT, we are not sure there is an inside to DIRFT, lorries reverse towards house sized hatches, presumably goods are exchanged, we do not witness any interaction. We do not see what goes on inside these giant roadside sheds, we do not see what the driver gets up to while his freight is switched, we do not see him take a break, chat with other drivers, perhaps indulge in the hackneyed cup of tea and bacon butty. Cross’s film denies human interaction, it performs the non-place in its refusal to do anything other than skim the surface, endlessly representing the same grey and green, while preventing any attempt at a deeper understanding of, or connection with the people or places of this everyday landscape.
It should be remembered that the idea of the non-place is, however, a product of a certain perspective, that of the driver, or indeed the passenger – let us say the traveller, who between starting point and destination inhabits a state of suspended placelessness. This suspension can be seen as a kind of everyday ensnarement, Lefebvre calls it ‘constrained time’ or ‘compulsive time’, time which is not quite your own and not quite belonging to the world of work, a state of in between functions as well as in between destinations (of course in Cross’s film the driver is both at work and in between destinations). Lefebvre argues that this form of in between time is encroaching further and further into everyday life:
if the hours of days, weeks, months and years are classed into three categories, pledged time (professional work), free time (leisure) and compulsive time (the various time other than work such as transport, official formalities, etc.) it will become apparent that compulsive time increases at a greater rate than leisure time (Lefebvre 2009 [1971]: p. 53).
Here we see compulsive time as blurring the edges of the otherwise carefully demarcated work time and leisure time. A difference which Lefebvre argues is key to both the impoverishment of the everyday and as an agent in its visibility. The non-integration of leisure and work, is for Lefebvre emblematic of the alienation of modern society. This integration, he argues, was lost with pre-modern agrarian cultures in which work and leisure were indivisible from the general process of living. In modern times those involved in paid employment cannot escape the tripartite of work time, leisure time and the non-place of constrained time.17
The feeling of entrapment generated by being in between places is also articulated by Michel de Certeau in ‘Railway Navigation and Incarceration’ (de Certeau 1984: pp. 111–14). While the idea of incarceration is obviously unpleasant, de Certeau also sees it as being the source of temporal escape, suggesting that rail travel provides a certain mix of freedom and incarceration which generates a situation in which the traveller can day dream. In one sense the traveller is physically unable to escape the train carriage, and is committed to the pre-ordained railway network of rails, prescribed routes and station stops, yet at the same time the statelessness of being in between meaningful locations such as home and work, creates the space in which the traveller’s mind might escape into reverie, ‘behind the windowpane, which from a great distance, makes our memories speak or draws out of the shadows the dreams of our secrets’ (de Certeau 1984: p. 112). Of course there are differences between the rail passenger and the car driver in terms of the amount to which each can allow themselves to be distracted by day dreams. However, as is made plain by the strangely mesmeric qualities of Cross’ film, when driving along a motorway, especially along a familiar route, one often settles down into what could be described as an attentive trance. To some extent one is alert to the movements of other drivers, but there is certainly the opportunity to let your mind wander with a kind of passive enjoyment that the only thing required of you is to keep your foot on the accelerator.
It is clear that the narratives of placelessness and timelessness of roads and driving are very much from the perspective of the driver. The mentality of the non-place is a product of the tyranny of the navigational road sign. Space becomes a coded text which creates the illusion that between the place names, glowing white on blue, there is nothing but a nameless space without history or meaning. But change the perspective from traveller to resident, and with it the modality from constant mobility to relative stillness, and it becomes evident that these roads are very much embedded in places. They generate an orbital belt of histories and meanings, through their influence on the shape and feel of everyday experience of place for the people who live with these roads.
If we start to claim the motorway as a feature of rural modernity, then the non-place can also be discussed as part of how the modern rural is experienced. However, it is important not just to claim the non-place as part of the experience of non-metropolitan everyday, but to trouble the idea of roads as non-places. If we shift the perspective to that of residents or residents as well as travellers, by thinking about the non-metropolitan as a place which is lived in as well as travelled through, then roads also become part of embodied, situated experience of place.
This process could begin with DIRFT. I have already noted that it is wrongly ascribed to Daventry, commentators more concerned with accuracy note its proximity to Rugby, or the part of the world just before the M42 becomes the M6, but all fail to identify its location as being just outside the village of Crick. Crick is an ancient village, it features in the Domesday book, it has a school and church and a post office. It is encircled by major roads, the transit connections that made it the ideal location for DIRFT have also made it attractive for commuters seeking to move out of the suburbs. Over the past 20 years the village has doubled in size, with large new housing developments being built on ex-farmland and a bypass taking heavy goods traffic out of its centre (Crick Village 2014). From this perspective DIRFT and the associated sections of the M42 and M6 are not non-places, they are part of the parish of Crick. I would not wish to argue that Crick is a piece of non-metropolitan England that has sadly become unwittingly host to these nameless roads and faceless distribution centre. Instead, if we are to recast non-metropolitan places as active sites of modernity it is important to recognise that the busy roads and distribution centres are part of the characteristics of this village. Rather than an upsetting anomaly in an otherwise picturesque village, this overlay of the ancient and modern is an example of what constitutes everyday experiences in non-metropolitan places. Roads and their accompanying infrastructure are widely seen not as part of the rural locations in which they are situated, but more as ribbon-like metropolitan enclaves which flap loosely across the countryside, tethered intermittently by their urban destinations. Their presence needs not only to be seen as part of a national or indeed global network of roads, but also as a feature of a local landscape. A view that challenges the more familiar narrative of the non-place.
Merriman (2004) provides a critique of Augé’s formulation of non-places arguing that it ‘fails to acknowledge the heterogeneity and materiality of the social networks bound up with the production of such environments’ (2004: p. 147). He asserts that spaces such as motorways are replete with complex networks of meanings, histories and perspectives:
Roads and motorways such as the M1 may be placed through the folding of a diverse range of spaces, times, thoughts and materials into different architectures, atmospheres, subjectivities and texts. Landscape architects, Irish and West Indian labourers, American bulldozers, public relations, booklets comparing the engineering of the motorway with the construction of the railways in the nineteenth century, guide books, journalists and even artists and BBC Radio producers are implicated in working and placing the motorway in different spaces and times (Merriman 2004: 162).
It is however important to acknowledge that the experience of motorway travel, does not easily lend itself to accessing the complexities of place and history described by Merriman. Even given Merriman’s criticisms of Augé’s formulation, as too generic and focused on creating new categories of hyper modern experience, the fact remains that mesmeric propulsion along anonymous motorways can create the impression of the world as non-place, a sensation which is effectively portrayed in Cross’ film. However, it is equally important to acknowledge that such journeys are relatively uncommon. Most driving takes place as part of an everyday routine, on a selection of familiar routes or ‘routinized time-space paths’ (Edensor 2004: p. 109), signed by self designated landmarks and embedded in everyday meaning. Edensor problematises the notion of the motorway as non-place by mapping his everyday commute along the M6 in terms of the sensual impacts of the road ‘At one point, pylons cross the road, causing the radio to crackle’ (Edensor 2003: p. 158), and the poetics of the landmarks he looks out for each day. These familiar features, make it possible to think about the experience of motorway driving not as one of anonymity and alienation, but one that can foster ‘modes of homely comfort, provoke affective and imaginative connections to other times and places, facilitate kinaesthetic pleasures, and construct complex topographies of apprehension and association’ (Edensor 2003: p. 152). For Edensor the daily commute is structured through a series of landmarks that indicate the interconnectedness of the motorway with the land through which it passes, personal stories and memories, and wider world rhythms:
Some mornings a herd of cows slowly cross over a footbridge on their way to milking … There are a series of polythene houses, a large shed and a fleet of lorries where bean sprouts are grown and transported … The motorway passes over a dell, which on the east side accommodates a small, bright pink church that looks like something Hansel and Gretel might visit (Edensor 2003: p. 158).
Edensor’s study shows that for the regular traveller the road can shift from a non-place to very specific interconnected place. However, for my study it is also important to think about how motorways operate as part of the rural landscape from the perspective of the resident. In changing the perspective from traveller to resident – and it must be made clear that this role might be taken by the same person at different times, keeping in mind that residents are not victims of these roads, but often willing users – it becomes evident that one of the ways in which major roads switch from the status of non-place to becoming embedded in place is through the visceral experiences of roads which are felt by the non-traveller. Not far from my house a field path passes underneath a raised section of the M3 motorway. Here the road is suspended above the landscape by a prolonged concrete flyover, travellers on the motorway have no idea what lies beneath their tyres. On either side of the road are fields of arable crops, cattle graze, there are two villages within five minutes walk and a stately home which has been turned into a private school. Approaching the flyover the noise from the road is so loud that if in company one has to shout to be heard, the road is so wide that the passage way beneath it becomes a tunnel. Underneath the road it is completely dark, it feels cold, it smells of dry mould, feet scuff uneven aggregate, noises echo, and the vibrations of the traffic overhead resonate in one’s chest. Inside the tunnel and at its edges I feel uneasy and vulnerable. Here I’ve seen peacock butterflies sleeping at night hanging upside down from the concrete beams. For me this road is very much a place, it is part of a place and a place in itself.
This road also has its own histories; just two miles south of my bit of the M3 the motorway carves a breathtaking channel through a piece of ancient chalk downland.18 This is Twyford Down, the scene of extraordinary road protests in the early 1990s, which bought many of the residents of this part of Hampshire together with the Donga Tribe (a group of new age travellers) and other environmental groups, in a set of prolonged and at times violent demonstrations against the M3 extension (McKay 1996: pp. 134–48).19 Protests against the road were grounded in environmental concerns, the destruction of habitat, ruination of the landscape and the increase in polluting car use. However, the preservation impulse of the stalwart Tory voter was also triggered, leading to an interesting situation which saw people with very different political outlooks and lifestyles occupying (sometimes literally) common ground. In addition to the new age travellers and ‘ordinary’ residents, some of the most vehement protestors were well heeled locals such as the Conservative councillor Barbara Bryant who wrote a book about the campaigns and subsequent legal processes (Bryant 1996). Even so, the protests were textured by class antagonism. The land for the road had been supplied by Winchester College, an extremely wealthy public school, which had also been gifted the land occupied by the old road which would no longer be in use, they seemed to be profiting from the resident’s and the environment’s loss (McKay 1996: p. 136).
Such protests alert us to the ahistorical illusion of roads and give the lie to the idea that roads, out of town shopping outlets and airports occupy previously ‘empty space’. Protests change the perspective on roads from mobile traveller to resident (even if only temporarily resident – like members of the Donga tribe) and they re-situate the non-place as meaningful, interconnected and historical place. The need for this disruption becomes apparent in the images taken at the Twyford Down protest. These photographs devolve much of their charge from the stilling of the road space. It is perhaps obvious to align speed with development and stillness with preservation, nevertheless images of the road protestors occupying the motorway space on foot, are visually stunning because of their incongruity, both in scale and in velocity. The road or rather the building of the road is brought to a standstill, and the non-place is inhabited by a community of protestors.
It is perhaps easy to make the connection between slowing down, stopping development and returning the motorway to a rural location – however speed can also be seen as a feature of the rural landscape.
Forms of haptic sensuality were actively avoided in motorway design, for the driver any feeling of friction or resistance in the form of uneven road surfaces, sharp bends or steep inclines were to be avoided. When such sensations do occur they are often deliberately engineered, perhaps most notably the rumble strip running along the boundary of the hard shoulder, which when crossed bumps the dozing driver back into awareness and back onto the carriageway.
As we have seen with the concerns of the protestors at Twyford Down, motorways occupy the cultural consciousness as other to the rural landscape, and often in direct opposition to it as its destroyer. However, debates around motorway design in England in the 1950s and 1960s reveal that motorways were originally conceived as belonging to a landscape of rural modernity.
In his fascinating research into the roadside planting of England’s early motorways, Merriman shows that not even the driver’s eye was to experience any resistance to the smooth flow of transit, particularly any visual unevenness which might result from overly detailed or fussy landscaping. Discussions about the type of planting that was most appropriate to the new ‘landscape of speed’ (Merriman 2006: p. 91) that the motorway represented were long and passionately fought. The two main players in this encounter were the Institute of Landscape Architects (ILA) and the Roads Beautifying Association (RBA). The ILA argued that the roadside landscape should be designed to be seen at speed and therefore emphasised the need for simplicity and flow, favouring the use of a limited number of native shrubs and plants. Whereas the RBA favoured the ‘pretty’ flowering shrubs and trees found in many domestic gardens. The ILA blocked proposals for the use of ornamental species which they felt to be too detailed, small-scale and distracting, threatening to fragment or disrupt the desired feeling of streamlined speed.
Interestingly, it is in this debate that we see that the motorway in its early conception was indeed thought of as a rural entity. Commenting on the planting scheme devised for the M1 motorway by landscape consultants employed by the construction company of Sir Owen Williams, which reportedly included the use of garden plants such as Forsythia on the central reservation and liberal use of Pyracantha elsewhere, the Landscape Advisory Committee deemed the scheme to be ‘too fussy, ornamental, colourful and urban for a modern rural motorway’ (my italics) (Merriman 2006: p. 92). In these early visualisations of the motorway the rural is playing a starring role in one of the most ambitious modern projects of the twentieth century. Merriman’s research shows that the debates among the engineers and landscape architects of the time made it clear that, in contrast to accepted notions of the countryside as a place of slowness and continuity, ‘Movement and speed are seen to be vitally important to the way we see, encounter and inhabit Britain’s landscape’ (Merriman 2006: p. 83).
Perhaps surprisingly, this conflation of the countryside with speed can also be seen, in the pages of the long running, traditional, publication Country Life.20 Speed is evident in both the advertising and editorial rhetorics of the magazine, a significant amount of which is focused around cars. Every year the magazine ran a motoring special to coincide with the Earls Court Motor Show featuring a detailed description of each of the stands. In addition it regularly included features on cars and motoring called ‘New Cars Described’ or ‘Motoring Notes’. Full page adverts for cars or car components introduce an aesthetic of speed to the magazine: in an advert for a Rolls-Royce dealership well over half the page is devoted to an image of striated tarmac giving the illusion of speed, with the highly desirable automobile perched atop, while an advert for Goodyear tyres uses images of a highly streamlined speed boat racing through maritime waters to advertise its wares.
This content gives the publication an unexpected texture in which narratives and aesthetics of speed sit next to features on standing stones and hibernating dormice, communicating a multivalent collage of speed and stillness, and by extension development and preservation.
This contrast is concisely articulated on the cover of the October 1970 Motor Show edition which features a highly polished, brand new Jaguar parked on a village street of half timbered cottages and a stone market cross. Along the bottom of the page runs the strap line ‘Ancient and Modern’ (Figure 2.5), producing an interesting example of how the tensions between these terms are played out in the non-metropolitan arena. This image works to equate the cottages and the car, there is no hint of incongruity, the deliberate juxtaposition situates both elements as examples of classic English design, heritage and crucially, aspiration.
The contradictions here are many and various. The car is the only one visible, there is nothing to link it with the congestion often experienced in rural villages where narrow roads and on street parking make speedy negotiation an impossibility. Equally there is little evidence of any of the changes that increased car user-ship has brought to places like this village, such as road widening schemes and the ill designed signage much maligned by individuals such as Nairn (1955) and groups like the CPRE (Matless 1998: p. 47). The image makes no concessions to the idea that national road development programmes are problematic in relation to preservation of the countryside. In addition it could also be noted that the half timbered cottages pictured here would have originally been built by and for peasant grade agricultural workers, in contrast to the luxury branded car, however given the proximity of the village to London and the date of this issue they too register as commodities in the luxury market, either as second homes or commuter residencies.
As it is portrayed in Country Life, speed is not associated with the building of rural motorways, instead it is part of an idealised affluent countryside in which tensions between ancient and modern are smoothed away by the timeless washing of a tide of ‘old money’. A powerful image of this can been seen in a copy of the magazine which ran an advert for a new Italian sports car, dark brown and sleek, emanating speed and power, next to an advert for a fine art auction featuring a painting of race horses of the same dark brown colour. As well as obviously playing a role in creating the illusion of perpetual rural prosperity, this pairing seems to tell a story of speed in countryside as historic, and part of its heritage. From powerful horses to powerful cars – speed has always been a feature of the countryside.
This is an ideology that is perhaps responsible for Country Life’s otherwise baffling under-reporting of motorway building as a countryside issue. During the prime decades of English road development (mid 1950s–mid 1970s) which saw hundreds of miles of land become the venue for new roads, motorways and their associated issues do not feature heavily in its pages. One of the few features on road development focuses on the building of the West Way in London (Taylor 1971: p. 981), firmly situating the motorway as urban phenomenon/problem rather than one directly effecting the countryside.
2.5 Front cover of Country Life, 15 October 1970.
The target audience of Country Life may have had residences in both the country and in London, and were easily mobile. While they may have talked the talk of preservation it was also important for them to tell a story in which the car belonged in the countryside; more specifically, that their big expensive cars belonged in the countryside, just as their families had done for many generations, whilst the smaller congestion creating cars of the newcomer or tourist were without this important heritage and therefore out of place.
So far we have seen how the ideas of speed and stillness might be used to conceptualise the cluster of anxious relationships that texture the modern, rural everyday. Concerns around development and preservation were central to Nairn’s polemics on the homogenisation of country and city that ill-designed and hastily implemented development would bring about. While Cross’ portrait of non-metropolitan England through the windscreen of an HGV, evidenced the realisation of Nairn’s feared subtopia in the standardised and seemingly anonymous network of motorways. To complicate this picture however we have seen how the road as super-modern non-place can also be experienced as a meaningful, rooted and inter-connected place, with a shift in perspective from traveller to resident and the associated shift in velocity that this necessitates. It has also been demonstrated that roads and the experience of speed need not always be thought of in opposition to the countryside, with the rhetorics around early motorway design enabling a certain reclamation of motorways as a significant feature of rural modernity. The following section builds on these stories of the conflicting tensions between preservation and development, the ancient and the modern, nature and technology, stillness and speed through a reading of the Shell County Guides which focuses on their multivalent negotiation of these tensions and their influential conceptualisation of the nation as old, strange and predominantly rural.
The Shell County Guides were a long running series of guidebooks to 35 counties of England sponsored by the Shell Oil company and produced between 1933 and 1985.21 Initially they were designed for the market of newly mobile middle class car owners, however, over their 50 year history they became a ubiquitous addition to a large proportion of Britain’s households (MODA 2008). Over this long period the design and content of the guides changed, in the 1930s they were inspired by avant-garde art practices of the time such as photo-montage and surrealism, with their authors often adopting an irreverent or entertainingly polemic tone. As the series progressed the guides became more conventional and less idiosyncratic.22 The guides focus on counties rather than the cities of Britain, meaning that they provide a view of England that centres on the non-metropolitan.23
If Andrew Cross’ film 3 hours from here could be seen as the inheritor of Nairn’s Outrage then the Shell County Guides could be seen as its forbear. They share a visual and textual rhetoric railing against ill thought out design (particularly with regard to architecture), whilst also exhibiting anxieties around the modern tension between preservation and development.24 Figure 2.6 is from the Oxon guide by John Piper (1938), it shows Banbury Road in Kidlington, just north of Oxford (incidentally just off the A34). It illustrates newly built housing in ribbon formation, ugly telegraph poles at odd angles and a road which is in the process of being widened (all elements that featured highly on Nairn’s subtopia hit list). The collage of ancient and modern that characterises the Shell Guides perspective on the non-metropolitan is made apparent in the text which juxtaposes this area of new development with the village’s thirteenth century church. A similar contrast is made in the Devon guide (Betjeman 1935) where, in what looks like a piece of photo-montage, a modern villa sits cheekily on the end of a Georgian terrace, a montage that has taken place at street level rather than the artists studio.
The Shell Guides also share with Outrage a concern with everyday detail which is presented in fragmentary ways (see Figure 2.2 for Nairn’s treatment of lampposts). In the Shell Guides this collaging of fragments takes place in a number of ways. For example an image titled the ‘tree of knowledge’ shows a tree stump festooned with advertising placards all jostling for the most prominent position, forming a montage of juxtaposed signs and lettering. Montage can also be seen within the guides in the odd connections that can be made between images on a page, an example of this can be seen in Paul Nash’s Dorset guide where a double page spread contains an image of twin sheep, their curly horns uncannily mirroring eachother, together with a photograph of a Freudian looking snake. Heathcote notes that ‘Nash’s images could make links between the forms of objects that were suggestive of greater closeness than mere facts would suggest’ (Heathcote 2011: pp. 45–6). Finally collage is sometimes present as fully realised photo-montage as in Cecil H. Greville’s evocation of ‘Slough Then and Now’ (Figure 2.7). The effect is disorientating and unexpected, perhaps doubly so given their subject matter, which is not shocks of the modern city – so often associated with montage (Benjamin 1970 [1934]: p. 90) – but the rural villages and market towns of England’s countryside.
2.6 ‘Kidlington’ from Oxon Shell Guide, 1936. © Shell Brands International AG. Courtesy the Shell Art Collection.
2.7 ‘Slough Then and Now’, Bucks Shell Guide, 1937. © Shell Brands International AG. Courtesy the Shell Art Collection.
These publications are fascinating documents which clearly evidence the early twentieth century re-framing of the English countryside as a space of leisure – rather than agricultural production (Borsay 2006: p. 186). They find much of their content in the lived material of the non-metropolitan everyday – vernacular architecture, door knockers, pub signs, conceptualising the country as a vast accumulation of everyday detail. Their use of avant-garde design to represent the English countryside aligns the non-metropolitan with modernity and the avant-garde, as does the connection with personal motoring. However, at the same time this innovation is cut through with preservationist rhetoric, a love of Victoriana, and the construction of an old weird rural.25 It is the intertwining of these apparently incongruous positions: the valorisation of the old, with the use of avant-garde aesthetics, together with Shell’s alignment with both nature and technology, that this section focuses upon.
The guides were the idea of John Betjeman, whose reputation as chronicler of the English middle classes (Taylor-Martin 1989: p. 11), together with interest in Victorian architecture are reflected in the style and perspective. It is these early incarnations of the Shell Guides, specifically those that were produced under his general editorship, that are explored in this section.
Each guide is a unique project with its inclusions, exclusions, rationale, illustrations, photographs, typography and format, determined by its editor, together with varying amounts of input from Betjeman. Many of the guides produced under Betjeman’s general editorship were written and compiled by artists. Contributions came from Paul Nash as editor for the Dorset guide (1936); his brother John Nash as the editor for the Bucks guide (1937), which included works from Stanley Spencer and Humphrey Jennings; and John Piper as the editor for the Oxon guide (1938). These contributions gave the publications a Neo-Romantic feeling for landscape that was cut with a Surrealist eye for the absurdities of both ancient tradition and modern development. This combination accessed the post-war nostalgic patriotism of the Neo-Romantic, an ideology inspired by William Blake’s mysticism and notions of Albion (Spalding 1994: p. 129), together with a disregard for authority and an attunement to the strangeness of the everyday of the European Surrealists (Gardiner 2000: pp. 35–40; Highmore 2002a: pp. 45–59). Montagu notes the links between these different responses to the landscape, and shows how they were opposed to the functionalist concerns of artists and architects inspired by the Bauhaus and the European modernist avant-garde, stating that:
[T]he counter or ‘traditionalist’, position was a ruralist fantasy that could be linked to the Romantic tradition, championing wilderness over garden and ruin over modern development. In its more modern guise, this position resembled the anti-linear, disordered and organic vision imagined by the Surrealists (Montagu 2003: p. 13).
While Neo-Romantics and Surrealists may find similar ground in the love of the wilderness and ruins, Surrealism offered an avant-garde aesthetic that passed an unexpected visual current through the guide’s often preservationist rhetoric.
It is perhaps Paul Nash in particular who negotiated most skilfully between the Neo-Romantic and Surrealist positions.26 David Mellor in his survey of British Neo-Romantic tendencies locates Nash’s response to Dorset as a key moment in this re-imagining of the British Landscape (Mellor 1987: p. 11). Yet at the same time Nash was also exploring surrealism, and his famous article ‘Swanage or Seaside Surrealism’ centring on the Dorset resort, was published in Architectural Review in 1936 – the same year as his Shell Guide to the county. In addition to negotiating between preservationist instincts and Surrealist influences, Nash found his neo-Romanticism somewhat at odds with the modernist movement in which he was also a central figure. Harris (2010: p. 22) points out it is possible to see very clearly in certain paintings how Nash is involved in reconciling the future-facing, rationalist abstraction of the Unit One artists, with his love of landscape and tendency towards mysticism. In his Equivalents for Megaliths (Figure 2.8), modernists geometric forms sit within a landscape and at times seem to become part of it, perhaps as ultra neat and tidy hay bales or reflected in the ridges of a Iron Age earth work. Nash’s guide to Dorset operates in a similar way, in that it makes visible the artist’s processing of the conflicting but equally seductive attractions of the ancient and the modern, accessing both preservationist sentiment and surreal aesthetics.
2.8 Equivalents for megaliths, 1935, Paul Nash (1889–1946). © Tate, London 2014.
In Dorset, Nash portrays a county that is very old, prehistoric in fact. That time has been registered in the very earth of the county, layered with fossils, earthworks, evidence of ancient farming systems such as strip lynchets, churches and tombs. He bookends the guide with flamboyantly anti-development polemic. Starting with a dedication ‘To the landowners of Dorset, The Council for the Preservation of Rural England, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and all those courageous enemies of ‘development’ to whom we owe what is left of England’ (Nash 1936a: p. 6), and finishing with a postscript:
When you go to an inn ask for English food. If you are given badly cooked so-called French food kick up a row. Use your influence … to clear the simple and often beautiful interiors of country churches free from the cheap colour reproduction of sixth-rate religious paintings and other undignified rubbish occasionally to be found there. Use your influence by writing or speaking against the frequent attempts on the part of jerry-builders and those bodies which attempt to absorb whole tracts of the open countryside for their more or less destructive activities (Nash 1936a: p. 44).
This concern for history and preservation is textured by Nash’s use of images that prompt surrealist visual correspondences, giving the county often associated with comfortable seaside holidays, an unfamiliar quality. The surrealist concerns of Nash can be seen to run throughout the guide starting with the front cover, a montage that treats the coast’s rock formations in a similar way to the object personages which had become a feature of Nash’s surrealist works.27 The title page features a dinosaur (Figure 2.9) labelled as a ‘Former Native’ of the county, after which a double page spread of a ship wreck seems to take on the characteristics of a toothy prehistoric beast. There is a use of doubling as a formal device here, something which was often used in surrealist works to disrupt the easy reading of imagery and on occasion access the uncanny; the dinosaur is reflected in a pool, in the ‘Flora and Fauna’ section a moth is photographed with its shadow and two identical rams stare out from the page, their horns making a visual connection with the ammonite fossil pictured elsewhere. Turning the pages of this guide a different sort of rural England appears.
2.9 Frontispiece from Dorset Shell Guide, 1936. © Shell Brands International AG. Courtesy the Shell Art Collection.
The physical form of the early Shell County Guides also marked them out as different from what had gone before, aligning them with newness and modernism. They were spiral bound with newly developed system called Spirax (Heathcote 2011: p. 15). This combined with their thin cardboard covers, and relatively few pages (averaging around 45 pages each), seemed to speak of speed. They were publications to be flicked through, looked at while on the move and due to their innovative new binding they would stay open at the appropriate page as you drove along. Photographic images were central to the design of the guides and photography’s status as a newly emerging art form among the avant-garde again accessed the vocabulary of modernism. Often double pages were given over to a single image reaching right to the edges of the pages with no borders, a look which is still strikingly contemporary.
These elements made the Shell County Guides significantly different in content and feel from the established guides that preceded them; in particular the European Baedeker guidebooks, that were extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth, with the word Baedeker becoming a generic name for any tourists’ guidebook (Koshar 1998: p. 303).28 Travel or least leisure orientated foreign travel at this time was predominantly the preserve of the upper classes, and represented a significant undertaking in both time and resources. The Baedeker guides gained a reputation for being full of thoroughly researched factual information (rather than commentary) about places to visit, travel and accommodation arrangements. The content was devised in order to keep the necessity of negotiation with tour guides, hotel keepers and other representatives of the tourist industry to a minimum for the well informed Baedeker traveller (Koshar 1998: p. 303).
Heathcote, speaking on a radio travel show, points out the Baedecker’s intended audience also influenced the selection of places of interest included in the guides – an audience of wealthy industrialists were interested in the industrial production of Great Britain, its towns and cities rather than its countryside:
Baedecker’s Great Britain is not a heritage theme park but an enormous industrial complex. It recommends great factories, markets, mines, also the life of the place, how people shop, musical culture, politics. You were supposed to really experience how the place functioned and was lived in rather than focus on museums, art galleries or stately homes. The nature of tourism and what constituted a site is very different in Baedecker than it is today (Excess Baggage 2009).
In contrast, the perspective of the Shell Guide is that of the (predominantly male) urban middle class motorist who wanted to visit the countryside. He too aims to be independent of the tourist industry, however his independence is granted through his means of transport, the personal motor car. Free from the restrictions of railway routes or pre-organised tour parties, the Shell Guide traveller cannot only devise his own itineraries (with help from the guide) but he can also ‘discover’ parts of the countryside, which are newly accessible to the motorist.29
In his guide to Derbyshire, Christopher Hobhouse makes the connection between this new form of individual motorised tourism and historical military invasions of Europe:
The motorist has an advantage that the railway traveller lacks: he can tackle a country that is new to him as an invading general would have tackled it, as Napoleon or Caesar would have tackled it, by its main contours, by its natural masses and its lines of communication. Derbyshire is perfectly made for such a method of attack (Hobhouse 1935: p. 7).
Domestic travel becomes exploration, with the undercurrents of colonialism that this also brings. The Shell Guide traveller is engaged in re-discovering a landscape that had never been lost. This rhetoric of exploration is evident in much of the company’s advertising of the time with the slogan ‘See Britain First on Shell’ being used in conjunction with images of picturesque locations. Overlooking the fact that these areas had been populated for millennia and had been seen many times before, not least by the people who lived in them, the idea of being the first, creates an idea of personal triumph but also social cachet in being the first of one’s peers to ‘do’ a particular sight.
This practice of ‘finding’ the country through motor tourism was popularised and chronicled by H.V. Morton in the enormously popular In Search of England (1927).30 Implicit in his title is the idea that England has somehow become lost, a handy phrasing which at once conjures up ideas of a real or authentic England, as opposed to the one in which most people carry out their daily lives. Furthermore, that this ‘real’ England is either temporally missing, in that it belongs to another time, or another place – namely the countryside. For Morton, England is only to be found in fleeting glimpses of a landscape in which history, topography and antiquity can be read. Morton characterises this hide and seek approach to tourism as a national pastime that is new, exciting and patriotic:
Never before have so many people been searching for England … The popularity of the cheap motor-car is also greatly responsible for this long overdue interest in English history, antiquities and topography. More people than in any previous generation are seeing the real country for the first time … the roads of England, eclipsed for a century by the railway, have come to life again; the Kings Highway is once more a place for adventures and explorations (Morton 1927: pp. vii–viii).
In addition to the slogan, the images used in Shell campaigns tie the brand to both speed and the countryside in quite an incongruous way. As a trader in motor oil and petrol the company evidently would want to closely align themselves with speed, efficiency and technological development. The unexpected element here is that given this alignment, Shell should also want to associate itself with the countryside, rather than for example the burgeoning metropolis. This decision is clearly linked with Shell’s desire to build on its image as a British brand (Mellor 1987: p. 11), a result of which was to also shape the national idea of what constituted Britain in the imagination.
A particularly striking poster image from this time was designed by Edward McKnight Kauffer (Plate 1). It seems to demonstrate this heady mixture of futuristic technological development with an ancient and mystical English landscape. The stylised image of Stonehenge at night time is exciting, the starry sky perhaps hints at the stones’ connection to another world. The stones are condensed into a tight circle. This is an essence of Stonehenge, one that gives the necessary amount of monumentality but is not overly concerned with accurate representation. This is Stonehenge for the pressed for time. Writing on Kauffer’s practice as a designer, Webb and Skipworth note that:
[H]e divided the public into two sections – the fast-moving and the slow-moving. Echoing a critic of an earlier generation who had defined a poster as ‘something that is read by someone who runs’, Kauffer preferred to design for the fast moving, whom he considered to be far the larger section of the discerning public (Webb and Skipworth 2007: 19–20).
It was not just the audience for these adverts that were perceived as in a hurry, but the adverts themselves were also moving at speed. In order to show their support for the CPRE’s campaign against advertising signage in the countryside, Shell pledged to remove all its promotional material from rural petrol stations and other countryside locations. Instead a scheme was devised using the sides of the company’s lorries as moving billboards (Hewitt 1998: p. vi).
Kauffer’s image represents a moment when the countryside could be associated with speed, indeed a moment when the speed of new technology needed to be cut with the beauty, and ancientness of the landscape. The rhetorics of speed and newness were in the first decades of the twentieth century – the decades which coincided with the development of the personal automobile – adopted by artistic and political movements of the Futurists in Italy and the Vorticists in England. The Manifesto of Futurism authored by the central figure of the group Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, used the automobile as a powerful symbol of a new world in which dynamism, speed and simultaneity were the defining conditions of modernity:
We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace (Marinetti 1996 [1909]: p. 147).
The reference to the Victory of Samothrace refers to the ancient Greek rendering of the winged Goddess Nike as messenger of victory. The futurists declared it was now time for this classical emblem of triumphant action to be supplanted by a figure representing the new beauty of the industrially produced object – the automobile becomes the high-speed, noisy herald of modernity. Partly in response to the Futurist manifesto, which appeared in English to coincide with the Futurists exhibition in London in 1912, Percy Wyndham Lewis produced Our Vortex (1914), a de-facto manifesto for the Vorticist faction of the English avant-garde. Like the Futurists, Wyndham Lewis advocated a violent rejection of the past. However, he also saw the future as an equally sentimental notion. For the Vorticists ‘the Present is the only active thing’ (Wyndham Lewis 1996 [1914]: p. 155). An interesting counterpoint to the Futurists obsession with speed and forward motion, the Vorticists saw themselves as the still point of the present at the centre of the whirling vortex, producing enigmatic statements mixing speed and stillness: ‘This is a great Vorticist age, a great still age of artists … Our Vortex desires the immobile rhythm of its swiftness … Our Vortex is white and abstract with its red-hot swiftness’ (Wyndam Lewis 1996 [1914]: p. 156). Kauffer himself maintained a practice as a painter as well as a poster designer, and was a founder member of Group X, a Vorticist group which included Wyndham Lewis.
The mechanised trauma of the First World War impacted considerably on the Vorticists’ philosophy. The untempered valorisation of the mechanical was no longer tenable, and the need for a return to more classical appreciation of the values of order, and a re-connection with tradition was voiced (Harrison and Wood 1996: p. 218). Although coming a decade behind the thoughts projected by the foremost avant-garde figures (Wyndham Lewis published his treatise on the need for a new generation of artists ‘The Children of the New Epoch’ in 1921), the Shell posters of the 1930s could be seen as reflecting this turn. Although essentially aiming to sell oil and petrol through the increase in personal motoring, few adverts in this decade portray cars, instead through the employment of artists and designers concerned with developing new forms of modernism, the adverts create a hybrid of the established order and comfort of the English countryside, with a speedy modernist edge.
The close relationship with the landscape courted by Shell in its advertising campaigns and guides display dialectical stances on development and preservation. The company’s involvement with the increase in personal motoring, leading to road building and expansion, pull in the direction of change and development. As does the guide’s promotion of motor tourism, which spawned many of the elements the guides protest so vehemently about: roadside shacks offering tea, a proliferation of signs, and hastily erected holiday chalets. Added to this is the oil extraction and processing industry which is responsible for many defilements of the landscape and environment more generally. Yet the use of neo-romantic re-imaginings of the countryside in the lorry bills, the valorisation of old things and rugged landscapes in the Shell Guides and the alliance with groups like the CPRE pull in the other direction.
Shell has consistently attempted to create a position for itself as simultaneously signifying both of these perceived oppositions. Patrick Wright comments that in the Shell advertising campaigns ‘those two constructed neutralities ‘nature’ and ‘technology’ walk hand in hand through this progressive, if slightly bizarre, modern world’ (Wright 1985: p. 60). Wright sees nature as being connected to cyclical time, while technology is aligned with the uni-directional onward movement of linear time, and argues that a clear example of Shell seeking to combine both of these models can be found in the campaigns that centred on the need for different oils in different seasons (Wright 1985: p. 62). An occurrence of this is shown in Plate 2, also designed by Edward McKnight Kauffer, advertising the exhilarating, if slightly spooky, possibilities for cold weather exploration of the New Forest using winter Shell oil. Like the lorry bills and much of the company’s advertising material the Shell Guides are multivalent, complex and contradictory. As we have seen they align themselves with both the ancient and the modern, the romantic and the avant garde, preservation and development, and nature and technology.
Finally I would also like to explore how the themes of speed and stillness (or slowness) are manifested in these publications. Many aspects of the guides effectively slow down the tourist experience. This is done by attention to detail, in direct contrast to the motorway ‘landscape of speed’ in which the detail contributed by variegated leaves and flowering trees was deemed so inappropriate. The pages of the Shell Guides bristle like a gothic cathedral, with an excess of detail. The features of an apparently uninteresting village, town or landscape are transformed into clusters of minutiae which could keep a willing visitor occupied for weeks. The reader’s attention is constantly drawn to the particularities of a place, such as stained glass windows, strangely shaped door knockers, shop signs and frontages. Everyday features which in one’s own town would not warrant a second glance are valorised by the Shell Guide authors, often taken as evidence of an ancient arcadia, where skilled craftsmen would devote endless time and energy to even the most mundane projects. In his guide to Buckinghamshire, underneath a photograph of an elaborately worked wrought iron pub sign, which also bears modern pendants from the AA and RAC motoring clubs (Figure 2.10), John Nash writes in praise of everyday detail:
2.10 ‘Ordinary Things’ image of pub sign and text below it, Bucks Shell Guide, 1937. © Shell Brands International AG. Courtesy the Shell Art Collection.
Ordinary things are often well worth looking at. Up to one hundred years ago craftsmanship in England was rarely skimped. This iron work support for the sign of the Bull Inn, STONY STRATFORD (with modern accretions) is a fine bit of blacksmith’s iron work of the late eighteenth century (Nash 1937: p. 35).
Such an attunement to the importance of vernacular detail, creates an impression of England as a palimpsest of undiscovered intricacy, the negotiation and proper appreciation of which required an investment of time.
Excess of detail can impede the passage of time, slowing down the progress of the visitor by encouraging them to attend to this shop sign or that chimney breast before moving on; however an accumulation of detail can, in some cases, work to speed up experience. A deluge of apparently unconnected detail can work to create a disorientating fragmentation in which the eye flits from image to image, fact to fact, consuming a place, without synthesis of its disconnected elements. Such a fragmentation of place is played out to spectacular effect on the front cover of the Wiltshire guide (Figure 2.11) which features an intensely detailed photo-montage by the aristocratic artist Lord Berners.31 It features images of the many notable characteristics of the county such as its pigs, sheep, Stonehenge, and Salisbury Cathedral, mixed together with stony faced Victorian women, crazed golfers, performing dogs and men with guns, all blissfully out of scale. This is an image of Wiltshire, indeed an image of England which communicates a combination of national eccentricity, pride and irreverence. It contributes to the Shell Guide’s image of England as a mystic arcadia. There are no elements of modernity featured in this montage, all the people are dressed in Victorian garb and all the architecture is eighteenth century or older. This is an image which accesses the idea of the countryside as belonging to the past, a sort of deep non-specific past in which it should be preserved, positing the idea that travelling into the countryside was in fact to travel back in time. As Matless notes, at this time ‘Motoring became styled as a modern practice in pursuit of an older England … The petrol engine allowed a passage into an old country’ (1998: p. 64).
2.11 Front and back covers of the Wiltshire Shell Guide, 1935. © Shell Brands International AG. Courtesy the Shell Art Collection.
While the content of this collage may have its origins in an earlier time its form is fully contemporary. Montage as a process of combining miscellaneous elements, was being widely used as a Surrealist methodology at this time. As mentioned above, montage is also a medium which Benjamin aligned with modernity (particularly with regard to film), for its specific ability to record and communicate disorientation, speed and shocks (Benjamin 1970 [1934]: p. 171).
It is in this capacity that the use of montage here can be thought of as an example of how the Shell Guides perform the complex manoeuvre of associating speed and modernity, not with the city but with the countryside and more than this, simultaneously articulating ideas of an ancient past.
The overcrowding of fragments within the collage articulates the compression of the tourist experience. The speed of which is also articulated most effectively by John Rayner in the Hampshire guide, when he urges the motorist to visit the astonishing paintings by Stanley Spencer which adorn the walls of the Sandham Memorial Chapel, in Burghclere (incidentally also just off the A34), ‘When you have spent six minutes looking at them’ he advises you should immediately get back on the road and head for the next attraction (Rayner 1937: p. 16).
Through an examination of the experiences, histories and visual cultures of driving in the countryside, this chapter has exposed rural modernity to be underpinned by a web of tensions pulled taut by divergent tendencies. Our starting point was the uncomfortable montage of tarmac and grassy burial mound, an image that seems redolent of the rural as a landscape of both speed and stillness. Further investigation reveals this notion to be augmented with many other oppositional currents: the ancient and modern, preservation and development, place and non-place, nature and technology, and neo-romantic and avant-garde aesthetics.
The next chapter is also textured by some of these oppositions, it too centres on an everyday practice in the countryside, that of littering. Like roads, litter is often seen as being a product of modernity which spreads out of the city and into the countryside. In a similar way it is also associated with pollution and environmental damage. Most interestingly however, litter is seen as being particularly ‘out of place’ in the countryside, and investigation of this reaction is productive in both revealing and complicating our assumptions about what (or who) belongs in a modern rural landscape.
1 Subsequently republished as a book (Nairn 1955).
2 The M1 motorway did not open until 1959 and then did not fully connect the South of England to Scotland, see Moran (2009: pp. 23–6).
3 The ‘Things in Fields’ referred to here are remnants of war time structures, hastily erected and still present 10 years after the end of hostilities.
4 Subtopia could be linked to Mumford’s (1940) notion of Megalopolis which he identifies as the emergence of the big city from the multitude of regional cities, he asks ‘Will urban life come to mean the further concentration of power in a few metropolises whose ramifying suburban dormitories will finally swallow the rural hinterland?’ (Mumford 1940: p. 223). This term is also used by Gottmann (1961) to describe the concentrated urbanisation over the massive area that is America’s Northeastern Seaboard.
5 The term subtopia finds purchase in Architectural Review where its use continues into the 1960s, it also features in Chaney (1990) in his article on the MetroCentre in Gateshead.
6 There is also a connection here to the idea of the non-place, the transition between subtopia as no-place and the more contemporary notion of the non-place as a product of super-modernity is made in the next section with an examination of Cross’ 3 hours from here.
7 Moran points out that to align this sinister creeping force with housing developments, rather than the very real threat of fascism at this time is somewhat ironic (Moran 2009: p. 136).
8 Lefebvre refers to societies of bureaucratically controlled consumption in relation to the network of controls that constitute the everyday enforced by the state through increased organisation of public and private life, and by state capitalism, which through advertising controls supposedly free areas of life such as hopes and desires, see Lefebvre (2008 [1958], 2009 [1971]).
9 Designers of the blue and white motorway signage Kinneir and Calvert were tasked with designing non-motorway road signage to be rolled out nationwide in the early 1960s, see Moran (2009: pp. 66–75).
10 The exhibition in which 3 Hours from Here was shown was called An English Journey, as was the resulting publication (Bode 2004).
11 This quote is not entirely representative of Priestley’s account which is generally positive, commenting on the relative prosperity of the city and the neatness of its streets and its inhabitants (Priestley [1934]1977: pp. 27–8). Southampton’s history of urban development is also a feature of Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism (2009) and Jonathan Meads’ An Encyclopaedia of Myself (2014).
12 The history of the ‘Big Shed’ warehouse and distribution centre is detailed in Moran (2009: pp. 148–50). Architecture critic Martin Pawley has also written on the subject with regard to out of town shopping centres, see Pawley (1988).
13 Patrick Keiller’s films are also important sources in any such lineage, taking the form of journeys they map the often mundane spaces, rhythms and architecture of non-metropolitan England, in a post-Thatcher era in Robinson in Space (1997) and more recently after the banking crisis of 2008 in Robinson in Ruins (2010).
14 As Merriman (2004: p. 146) points out this state has also been theorised as ‘placeless’, ‘abstract’, and ‘ageographical’.
15 Their ahistoricity is of course an illusion, and many road and supermarket developments are vehemently challenged by local residents, the timelessness of the non-place could almost be designed as answer to these protests, which are discussed more fully later.
16 Moran (2009: pp. 91–5) identifies this term as originating in Florida in 1988 as a derivation from ‘roid rage’, the aggressive behaviour of steroid users, and maps its use in the British tabloid press. Lupton (1999) places its origins in Los Angeles in the same time frame, and explores the matrix of symbolic meanings of cars and driving which may have contributed to this phenomenon. Sinclair in his psychogeographic account of the M25, London Orbital (2002) sees road rage in terms of the rhythms and energies created by hyper-modern modes of experience, he writes of an incident that ends in a death as one of the ‘gates that act as circuit-breakers, disturbing the energy generator that hums continually around the undisciplined body mass of London’ (2002: p. 12).
17 It should be noted that those involved in primarily childcare and household duties may not be able to make these distinctions so easily.
18 This piece of road is significant in both Nairn and Cross’ journeys, in 1955 Nairn used the old A33 route from Southampton to Winchester en route to the A34, which circumnavigated St Catherine’s Hill on the outskirts of Winchester, whereas as in 2004 Cross takes the new M3 extension which is effectively built through the middle of the Down.
19 The anti M3 campaign was begun by local residents in March 1985, it gathered pace and became of national significance from 1987 onwards (Bryant 1996), the Donga Tribe set up camp directly on the building site in 1992, where a number of battles with security firms took place, most notably the Bailey Bridge battle in 1993 resulting in many arrests and the Mass Trespass in 1994.
20 Country Life was founded in 1897 and continues to be produced as a weekly glossy magazine aimed at the wealthy country elite (Hewison 1987: p. 57).
21 There is also a Shell Guide to the West Coast of Scotland and Oban (Bone 1938), and in the 1960s and 1970s guides were published to Mid Wales and North Wales (Mawson 2010).
22 However, they continued to maintain a distinctive design aesthetic particularly in terms of the use of photographic images under the long editorship of artist John Piper. Piper became joint editor with Betjeman in 1959 and after Betjeman left in 1967, Piper took over as sole editor and continued until the publication of the final Shell Guide in 1985 (Mawson 2010).
23 Notably in his guide to Oxon (1938) John Piper chose to leave out the city of Oxford.
24 The Shell Guides and Outrage are also connected by Architectural Review, as noted above Outrage was first published as an edition of Architectural Review, and John Betjeman was working for Architectural Review when he began editing on the Shell Guides, Architectural Press, who published Architectual Review, also published the Shell Guides between 1934–36.
25 Betjeman’s love of Victoriana is particularly evident in many of the typefaces and setting used which are reminiscent of Victorian newspapers and journals. Heathcote points out that this was a subversive interest at the time (2011: p. 21), however, in a contemporary reading of the guides it adds an additional texture of archaism.
26 Nash was also involved in the functionalist/modernist movement as a founder member of Unit One (the English modernist group which included Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson as members) and as Montagu goes on to note ‘found himself in the cross-fire of these two opposing tendencies (Montagu 2003: p. 13).
27 Nash’s object personages are similar to the Surrealists’ objet trouvé, however for Nash they had an innate mysticism ‘To attain personal distinction, an object must show in its lineaments a veritable personality of its own … it must be a thing which is an embodiment and most surely possess power’ (Nash quoted in Montagu 2003: p. 93).
28 First published in 1838 by Koblenz based (later Leipzig) Karl Baedeker A Baedecker guide to the Rhineland was published earlier in 1832, but the later 1838 version was much revised and took what became the classic form for the Baedecker guides (Koshar 1998).
29 Shell Guides did not provide itineraries in the same way as the Baedekers, rather they featured a selection of sites of interest, particularly in their Gazetteer sections, leaving the driver, in the spirit of individual exploration, to devise his own tours.
30 In Search of England was so popular that it had achieved its twenty-sixth edition just 12 years after its publication (Matless 1998: p. 65). It also spawned numerous spin offs for the author including The Call of England (1928), then perhaps predictably throughout the 1930s published: In Search of Scotland, In Search of Scotland Again, In Search of Wales, In Search of Ireland, and later I Saw Two Englands (1942).
31 In addition to producing pieces of visual art Berners was also a well known composer and writer (Dickinson 2008). His country residence was Faringdon House in Oxfordshire, and his painting of Faringdon Folly was used on a Shell Lorry Bill in 1936 (Hewitt 1998: p. 75). He famously used to dye white pigeons a selection of pastel shades to enliven his estate and appeared as the extravagant Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford’s In Pursuit of Love (1945).
