Walking the M62

To charm motorways

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

- J.G. Ballard, from ‘What I Believe’ and quoted in an interview with Iain Sinclair on the Ballardian website.

The Secret Life of the Motorway

BBC Four is excelling itself with The Secret Life of the Motorway, an excellent piece of social documentary. Martin Parr reads out what people wrote on the back of their postcards sent from Forton Services in the early 1960s (when motorways themselves were tourist attractions); Will Self ruminates on how motorways might become our age's equivalent of megalithic remains: to future peoples, the only visible signs left in the landscape of our civilisation and its concerns. No Iain Sinclar or J.G. Ballard (as yet, two programmes in from three) but a host of other fascinating contributors. What better way to prepare for my M62 adventure.

TRIP 2008

TRIP stands for Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives. Their website is here and it points towards some other tricksters who perhaps I may encounter on the Manchester leg of my walk, such as the Manchester Area Psychogeographic:

"MAP is a psychogeographic newsletter for Manchester and its surrounding area. Psychogeographic publications have poured out of London in recent years - we think it's time Manchester was looked at and recorded. Our aim is to bring to light the truth about Manchester that remains hidden by time, buried under layer upon layer of concrete, shoveled aside by banal culture. Our interests lie in the hidden history, the ulterior motive, and the suppressed geography that the consumerised city centre masks. To detect that geography we are prone to the use of disorientating and de-normalising methods in language and testimony."

Oh yes, their raison d'etre (as I think they say in Crumpsall) resonates quite deeply with me.

The BBC on the M62

From ellandback, a Great link to a BBC page with a wealth of info on aspects of the M62. Tales of the origins of the road, stories of terror and loss, the inevitable focus on Stott Hall Farm - the one in the middle of the motorway. Plus 120-mile-a-day commuter John Campell from Lepton near Huddersfield on life in the fast lane: "People are texting each other as they're driving at 70-plus. You've got women doing their make-up, people looking like they're doing sudoku..."

Posted to SABRE

I've joined the forum on the website of Sabre, the Society for All British Road Enthusiasts, just to ask these folks if they've any particular knowledge of or interest in the M62. It's a great new world for the uninitiated, their site, and leads via weblinks into many other wonderful worlds of British road minutae. Hopefully I may get some respondents coming this way.

www.walkingworld.com

My first purchase of a Sunday paper for some time today, drawn to The Observer by the promise of a 32-page City Walks supplement. Promoting the idea that on-foot exploring can open up realms of discovery in the previously-overlooked parts of our urban areas, and citing Bob Gilbert's seminal The Green London Way as an inspiration Pas Paschali's introduction only fails at the last when he feels the need to suggest that 'urban walks could be seen as a first step towards more ambitious walking, in the countryside, or on national trails'.

That depends, Pas, on your definition of 'ambitious', but I won't dwell on that. Oh, well, except to say that the first route in the supplement invites the walker onto an 8.5km journey linking the Shankhill Road with the Falls Road, with Paschali breathily promoting the area as an 'open-air free museum' of The Troubles. Hardly needs saying that ten, fifteen years ago, walking that route would have been ambitious, for all sorts of reasons, and that today many contrary-ambitious walkers find sites of urban conflict to be fertile territory.

Everything in the Sunday papers has a promotional tie-in of course, and this supplement, which I'll carry on my M62 walk to guide me through the sanctified urban-tourist (neo-tourist? uber-tourist? gucci-tourist?) routes in Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, was really designed to encourage readers to subscribe to www.walkingworld.com which is an online repository of over 3500 walking routes, urban and rural, from all around the country. Pay them the odd sum of £17.45 and you get a year's worth of online info at your fingertips. I was persuaded quite easily, once the walkingworld search engine brought up six pretty interesting M62 related walks, plus a few around Saddleworth and some which will help connect me on my travels between East Hull and North Cave (source of the M62). And this one here, under the M60 in The Mersey Valley.

Pointers towards the journey

Pointers towards the journey:

1.
A fascinating walk yesterday around Norris Green Park, led by Paul, one of our city's excellent Park Rangers. This small and (I'd thought) quite unremarkable park was illuminated for us by a man deeply knowledgeable of local history and flora and fauna. Most astonishing insight - inside the ruins of what used to be the kitchen gardens of Norris Green House (abandoned in the 1930s and since all but demolished) we were introduced to numerous examples of a rare tree, the Chinese Wingnut. Brought here by John Pemberton Heywood, collector of rare species for his gardens, these lovely trees have flourished in a forgotten corner of what by reputation is a dull, monochrome, housing estate. Lesson learned for my travels: never again, under any circumstances, use the term, "There's nothing worth looking at there."

2.
A good day today at Henry's, talking over ideas for the M62 adventure. Designed to add some symbolic, spiritual aspects to the walk, we talked over the ideas of my (a) composing a 'Prayer for the Walk' which I could use at the beginning, repeat and/or revise as I go along; (b) putting that or something else on a card which I could give to people I meet and engage with en-route; (c) starting off a poem-prayer-reflection which I would invite people to add a couple of lines to as we go along - a sort of transpennine motorway epyllion or epode; (d) giving and receiving gifts or tokens from those who provide me with hospitality, passing on the gift previously received to the next host en-route, thus creating a chain of giving (and cross-Pennine collaboration).

This conversation made me recall Graeme's idea some time ago that 'Perhaps it should be mandatory to bring a single torn out page of ‘On the Road’ and then (at the final destination) the pages compiled in reverse order and bound into a single volume to be left at Bill's Tower? – Each person could write a single word (in their own blood) on the top left hand side of their page to see whether anything of significance is constructed from the words once the volume is bound?'

Plenty of potential in all these thoughts.

Simple journey

This is an extract from Paul Farley's reinterpretation of Polyolbion, Michael Drayton's epic journey in verse around England and Wales. I love the poem, of course, with its viewpoint the Mersey banks and its playful alt.rock Godspeed nod (which means something else to me too).

I like Farley's interview too, which accompanies the poem in Magma 37 (Spring 2007). In it he talks of being excited by Beryl Bainbridge's update of Priestley's English Journey, when she came to the place where he was growing up, and his admiration of other literary journeys such as Paul Theroux's Kingdom by the Sea or Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Space. And especially - because it encourages my own related quest - I like the way he describes what he's trying to do on the journey he is making to retrace Michael Drayton's steps:

'My own intentions are simply to write as well as I can, I can't offer up any sense of project beyond that. I would like my poem to contain the fizz and crackle, the texture, of the contemporary and our experience of living in this landscape and moving through it. I would admit to that.'

Roads go on

Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.

On this earth ‘tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure

- Edward Thomas

Good to meet up yesterday with Joe Moran, whose current project is the soon-to-be-published Queuing for Beginners; The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime and who is then going to be turning his attention to the minutae of life on the roads. He tipped me off about Thomas, who wrote a lot about roads and who (according to Lucy Newlyn) "saw the world as a walker sees". Fertile ground, all of this.

Walk / not walk

Time for some more walking. Reasons:
1. A commission to create and then write-up a local 'pilgrimage' for Coracle;
2. An invite to join Phil on his 150 mile walk following in the footsteps of the acorn-planting engineer Charles Hurst;
3. Watching John's films of Nick Papadimitriou who I really can't like because he's one of those people who annoyingly chews as he talks, but is nevertheless a compelling psychogeographer;
4. Enjoying Jeremy Deller's Folk Archive, a lovely photographic collection of the sort of contemporary English eccentricity which can be freely witnessed on any road;
5. Discovering This is 'Ull, that city's lively people's website, with refeshingly not a mention of (yawn) Willy Wilberforce... which makes me want to get out there soon...

Time to hold the walking. Reason:
1. Just looked out of the window. It's snowing again.