Ballardian

Well, I may have dumped the freeway/motorway image from the banner of this site, but the strange, human-effacing power of tar-bound macadam encased in concrete and steel and pounded at high-speed by the hard jazz of autogeddon still endures for me.

Watch this; sounds wonderful:

The Secret Life Of The Motorway Ep 1/3
Tuesday 21 August
9.00-10.00pm BBC FOUR

The Secret Life Of The Motorway celebrates the “road revolution”

This series pays homage to Britain’s motorways – the people who built them, the people who use them and the people who risked their lives to stop them. Along the way, everything from early driving experiences and the joys of motorway services to the rise of the protest movement are re-lived.

At just six miles long, the first stretch of motorway, the M6 Preston Bypass, was opened in 1958 [Northern Ireland boasts a stretch of motorway less than a mile long, between two roundabouts on the way from Belfast to Larne... - JM]. For the first time, people could travel further, more easily and quicker than ever before, thanks to this groundbreaking “road revolution”.

This programme charts the beginning of Britain’s love affair with motorways, meeting the engineers and builders who designed and built this first motorway, through to those who toiled to complete the most complex road intersection in the country – Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction.

The bizarre and often thrilling experience of driving on these new, fast roads is described by the people who were among the first to drive and work on them.

But with no speed limit, no crash barriers between the carriageways and cars that weren’t built for high speeds, the risk of accidents was high. To combat the dangers, the Motorway Code was introduced – along with some rather amusing public information films to explain the “dos and don’ts” of motorway driving.

The Secret Life Of The Motorway celebrates the birth of motorways and hails the achievements of those behind the “road revolution”. Part two can be seen tomorrow, with the concluding part on Thursday.

[ via Joe McNally ]