Crossrail took 20 years, and ran billions over budget, and only one of the three lines is open so far. But it’s open. And that’s something. For over the past decade or so I’ve grown pessimistic about the prospect of any work of civil engineering ever being delivered, to any kind of schedule or budget, in modern Britain.
Some of the difficulty seems to arise from the sheer weight of what’s already there, whether it’s regulations, houses, roads, communities, title deeds, drains, vested interests and so on. A nation that’s centuries into its current iteration, on an island continuously inhabited by humans for 40,000 years, has had the opportunity to accumulate a hefty overlay of stuff, at least some of which has to be flattened or else worked around if you’re going to build anything new.
But it isn’t just the weight of history gumming us up. The Victorians had nearly as much history as we did, and they managed to crack on: Paddington Station went from planning decision to opening Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s magnificent steel-framed structure in three years, between 1851 and 1854. But somewhere between Brunel and today, urban planners first began to worry about the impact of grand plans on ordinary people, and then to grow just as worried about the impact of ordinary human activities on our ability to deliver grand architectural schemes. And the entire contemporary urban and ex-urban layout of the whole South East is shot through with this tussle, which we could characterise as the politics of abstraction.
To explain what I mean by such a politics, let me describe two consecutive days of getting lost, in two similar but also very different woodlands: the Ramble in New York’s Central Park, and a patch of publicly owned forest close to me in Britain. These spaces cover a similar amount of ground, and are both (in human terms anyway) mainly used for leisure. Both are riddled with little paths. But how they got their walkways, and thus how it feels to move through them, couldn’t be more different; and this difference illustrates something subtle and characteristically modern about how we build today.
The term for a path that appears spontaneously, because someone or something often needs to pass that way, is a “desire path”. Here’s one near me, crossing a field of half-grown wheat.
Desire paths are rarely straight, but rather follow the line of least effort through the landscape. They’re maintained by usage: the one in the picture disappears briefly, every year, when the farmer ploughs and sows the field — then, every time, it’s trodden back in within a few days. Such footways capture an emergent, organic way of using space, which blurs the boundaries between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. We are, after all, not the only species to take regular routes through our home areas — and by doing so, over time, write on the soil with our feet.
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