In my talk in Brasilia I looked at the photography of the urban environment and some of the changing ideas in planning, and how the invention of the car had completely altered our cities. Ideas about Garden Cities at the end of the nineteenth century had been overtaken by urban sprawl.
A12 Eastern Avenue at Gants Hill, London 1995
One of Britain’s greatest writers, J G Ballard and I live on the same ‘terroir‘, the gravel-rich fertile flood plain of south-west Middlesex, now pock-marked by gravel extraction, scarred by acre after acre of water-filled pits. More water towers over us behind the grassy high wall slopes of reservoirs containing west London’s water supply. The sand and gravel has been transformed into roads and houses; the orchard and plots of my grandfather now a housing estate, some of our most fertile land now under the concrete and grass waste of Heathrow.
Round here Mr Cox discovered the sublime king of apples, but crops now are contaminated by unburnt hydrocarbons and heavy metals. Cars and lorries speed along roads grimy with greasy grey dusts, planes thunder low overhead and levels of air pollution go off-scale. Once broad and proud Roman roads long unable to cope, their 1930s arterial replacements fare little better, the ‘Great West Road’ at Brentford now a dark and dimly lit racetrack under an elevated motorway.
Under the Car (C) Peter Marshall
I’m not sure if I saw the TV film starring Ballard in 1970, called ‘Crash!’ or simply read about it. A couple of years later his ideas about the 20th century’s love affair with the car re-appeared, worked into a more dramatic format in his novel ‘Crash’, set in our shared locale (but many years later shifted to Toronto for its remaking as a feature film.)
Under the Car (C) Peter Marshall
My own series on car culture, ‘Under the Car‘, started in the 70s and continued for around ten years, although never finished.
Under the Car (C) Peter Marshall
Under the Car (C) Peter Marshall
Under the Car (C) Peter Marshall
Without Ballard my Under the Car essay would have been rather different. His more recent books, particularly Kingdom Come (2006) are a chilling view of an England only too clearly close to the present.