Rivers of asphalt and steel: the arteries that connect and divide us city dwellers

While all city dwellers tend to root themselves and thus embed their identity in the street or the block in which they live, the arteries that connect the city with the rest of the country continue to fascinate us.

Perhaps because they appear on the news when they are clogged with traffic, the arterial roads and motorways in and out of London are logged in our mind. Similarly, problems on the fast — and not so fast — rail lines into mainline London stations make us think about past journeys for fun, friendship or work. The river too holds a sway over us despite its replacement by airports as the way into the city from abroad.

Although the city has gone through a series of metamorphoses and reconstructions over the centuries, these inward paths act as ley lines. In the case of the roads, they often follow routes laid down by the Romans and their ancient predecessors and successors. The A1 follows the Roman Ermine Way north, the A2 to the east was a Celtic trackway and the Roman Watling Street, while the A3 to Chichester and the south starts as Stane Street.

Rounding off the compass points is Via Julia from which the A4 and M4 take their routes to and from the west of England. If one is looking for an example about how London is constantly changing but ultimately retains echoes of its past, then this road — also known as the Great West Road and the Bath Road — provides an ideal example. The need for a route for trade and travel between the east and the west of southern England dates back to the history of human habitation in England and has left its traces throughout London.

Nowadays, the A4 now takes a jagged path from its origins just north of Fleet Street, passing through Aldwych — the Saxon old city — before following the Strand, Piccadilly and Knightsbridge as it forms the start of the vehicle route between London and its western neighbours. At Hammersmith, the elevated section rears up, leaving a permanent monument to the road building age that snakes out towards Heathrow.

That modern section of motorway and semi-motorway road, like many similar road schemes, is the result of the congestion that inevitably impacted the Roman road as the population and demand for goods surged over the centuries. As I discussed a few weeks ago, the Westway road that becomes the A40 running all the way to Fishguard in west Wales, is the prime example of the application of modern construction to old routes.

These pathways into and out of London have always captured artists’ imaginations. The road to Kent is an important medium for Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales while more recently, the road from Bermondsey in south London to Margate, also in Kent, provides the plot device for Graham Swift’s Last Orders.

JMW Turner captured the shift from old to new modes of travel in his dramatic painting Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway. A steam engine comes towards us as it crosses the Maidenhead Railway Bridge in the rain: designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the bridge was completed in 1838. We are looking east towards London as the train heads to the west. He is representing the new way of travel, and whether he is condoning or condemning it is down to the view’s interpretation.

Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway, by JMW Turner at the National Gallery, London

It makes sense that a contemporary artist would choose the A4 road as the subject of a series of paintings of that thoroughfare in its all its beauty and ugliness. Rivers and Roads that ran in the Barbican Library until 29 September, featured the work of painter Helena Butler, based in Brentford, west London, who uses an abstract style to capture the changing light and dramatic tension that the local scenery evokes.

She has chosen the M4, but her viewpoint is not of the historic origins of the road in inner London but of the new road that was built to relieve Brentford High Street of congestion, and which manifests itself as it snakes through the suburbs of the much-expanded city. Her works include abstract but industrial views of the elevated section and of the buses and cars travelling on the road underneath. One painting of a man waiting with his dog for a green light at a pedestrian crossing captures the mundane reality of roads, whether in London or elsewhere.

Stay! By Helena Butler. Photo by author

As I drove back into London on Sunday evening — down the M1 from Durham rather than along the M4 — I realised I was part of a large collective but anonymous community of drivers. The sea of red brake lights ahead revealed a large mass of people all travelling in unison for a common purpose. Yet the identity of each driver was invisible to the others, the opposite of the reality centuries ago when travellers and wagon drivers would have greeted each other as they crossed paths.

While few, if any, roads are likely to be built into London and the public transport budget is depleted after the successful Crossrail/Elizabeth and the botched High Speed 2 railways, the paths now occupied by today’s roads and rails will always be the arteries that bring people into a city in which they can swiftly disappear and become invisible.