Walking the M62

Wedding on J24 / There is a Light that Never Goes Out

A real transpennine occasion yesterday, Paul and Tash cementing their Liverpool-Halifax connection by marriage in a hotel just off M62 J24. The motorway is up there in the mists somewhere. The party featured a fine selection of great northern musics: Kaiser Chiefs, Happy Mondays, The La's. I spent an hour in the hotel room reading Simon Armitage's masterful meditation on modern life on the wild Yorks-Lancs border, All Points North. And in this pic Paul's completing the North-West cultural corridor references by doing a Morrissey.

To Hull and Back

The all-new and very excellent New Statesman website this week features an article by Joe Moran, whose book title I nicked for my series of talks on Reading the Everyday. Time, I think, to get in touch with Joe because with this article he's brought our connections ever closer. His subject is the story of the M62.

Joe's discovered some great references to the iconic stretch of road, including the Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage who says that the M62 'marks the true north, "where England tucks its shirt in its underpants"', John Shuttleworth who famously sang that he feels like The Man Who Lives (in the farm in the middle of) the M62, and the architect Will Alsop with his highly suggestive but to my mind dystopian fantasy Supercity (an unbroken band of urban life ribboning along the motorway all the way between Hull and Liverpool).

The main concern of Joe's article is to revisit the founding vision of a liberating motorway which would cure all cross-pennine travel ills. Thirty-five years after the M62's opening the reality is horrible congestion, 'without the compensation of being iconically awful like the M25'. Joe points towards a future where tolls will change the habits of drivers, who might thus become better connected to the places currently bypassed by the M62 (including Leeds and Manchester which 'don't clamour for attention' on the motorway's signboards and Hull and Liverpool, of which the motorway stops short).

One assumption Joe makes is one I must challenge - the assumption about the direction of travel. The tendency is to read the motorway as west - east ('The Road to Hull' - very good, Tim C). But not so for me. As for Bill Drummond (see previous post) my waters tell me that it has to be east - west. The destination is the all important thing, and that just has to be Liverpool. Which of course gives me the opportunity, should I dare to take it, to subtitle this project To Hull and Back.