Machining the Moors: Motorway Landscapes and Policy

Brook, Richard (2024) Machining the Moors: Motorway Landscapes and Policy. In: Motorway Architecture and Landscapes Retrospectives and Perspectives between Critique and Design., 2024-03-01 - 2024-03-02, Politecnico di Milano.

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Abstract

The M62 motorway in the north of England was completed in the early 1970s. Its design was exemplary of the types of concerns espoused by landscape architects in Britain in the 1950s. Partly by virtue of its topography, partly attributable to talented engineers, the motorway scenically winds its way over the southern Pennine hills from Lancashire in the west to Yorkshire in the east. As a vital piece of infrastructure, the route connects Europe to the Americas (the port of Hull to the port of Liverpool), as well as interweaving the fortunes of the north’s industrial cities. In tandem with the development of the motorway, other major infrastructure transformed the Pennine landscape. Most notable were large reservoirs for public water supply, including the world’s first dam-motorway hybrid at Scammonden, Huddersfield, near to the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. The delivery of such complex entanglements in difficult upland conditions demanded new forms of collaborative practice between various tiers of government, a range of professionals, publics and contractors. These infrastructural landscapes were three-dimensional compositions somewhere between sculpture and engineering. Their aesthetic qualities were deliberate and, as undertakings within nationalised governmental structures, carried both civic and amenity responsibilities. Time has rendered this sense of sublime beauty almost obsolete, the memory of pride in their completion is faded, ceding to priorities of speed and the negative implications of carbon made and carbon driven space. Such notions account for poor physical transformations to the motorway landscape and its apparent invisibility as a designed object. Here, I argue for an appreciation of a heritage landscape that demands a holistic view of the agents acting on its production and understands its production as of particular political circumstance. In so doing, I invite the idea of state structures themselves as heritage objects, with potential to enact positive change in their reconstruction.