Author: Walking the M62

The first thing I did in 2007 was to complete the jigsaw I’d started on Christmas Day, of an OS map of Liverpool with my house at the centre (thanks Linda). Interesting reflecting on how I approached the task, not being a jigsaw person usually, but definitely a map person:

1. I started with the River Mersey: mainly as the swathe of gorgeous clear blue which the OS generously use to indicate our old grey waterway made the jigsaw pieces on the Mersey the easiest to identify in a box full of urban-industrial details;

2. Next, I took the motorways: blue again, and so familiar in their shape (M57 arching anticlockwise around the city edges, M62 approaching cautiously from the east, prompting Epiphanies, stopping short in the Broad Green suburbs);

3. Then it was place names, identifiable features which guided me. Not always ones I know well but ones which have for whatever reason stuck in my mind – Southdene, Woolfall Heath, Windy Arbor, Waddicar: places I’ve never been but somehow know where they are.

4. I was struck by my ignorance of some road numbers and routes: and the leisurely pursuit of doing this jigsaw has educated me about, for instance, the way the A506 links ancient Walton Church with overspill Tower Hill, and the way that the A580 East Lancs splits somewhere near here, one branch ending at Goodison Park and the other at the hilltop T-junction joining Breck Road with Everton Brow where there are wondrous views of the city centre below.

5. I was also struck by how the places I know best were among the last pieces I completed: perhaps because the city centre is reduced to a complex mulch of roads on this particular map, and suburban Crosby bears no obvious identifying marks. Or perhaps because I was saving the best till last.

2007 may be the year when I take one jigsaw piece at a time and let each one guide me on an exploration of that particular area. I just discovered the great potential in this by selecting, at random, this piece, which turns out to be a fascinating bit of Aintree featuring the old Vernons Pools complex, sections of the Trans-Pennine Trail and the Liverpool-Ormskirk railway line, the shopping park where I guess today hundreds of people will be hunting for bargain beds, part of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and part of Aintree Racecourse which the canal crosses. Above the canal there’s a housing estate with a church in it, and the road the church is on is Altway, where I had my first-ever job interview 29 years ago.

So a journey in this map piece will involve nosing around the old Vernons site to see what’s going on there now, exploratory wanderings around the boundaries where commercial site and canalside meet, a personal pilgrimage down Altway (which I’ve never been back to since 1978) and of course, attempts to discover what the Canal Turn looks like out of season and from excluded zones.

There are 255 pieces in this jigsaw. As you can tell, I’ll be really going places in 2007.

A real transpennine occasion yesterday, Paul and Tash cementing their Liverpool-Halifax connection by marriage in a hotel just off M62 J24. The motorway is up there in the mists somewhere. The party featured a fine selection of great northern musics: Kaiser Chiefs, Happy Mondays, The La’s. I spent an hour in the hotel room reading Simon Armitage’s masterful meditation on modern life on the wild Yorks-Lancs border, All Points North. And in this pic Paul’s completing the North-West cultural corridor references by doing a Morrissey.

Thanks to a brilliant tip-off from the ever-vigilant Dave I’ve been spending a long time printing off the very excellent Motorway Map, inspired by Harry Beck’s London Underground map. By the creators’ own admission it is totally impractical but nevertheless it’s wonderfully engrossing, especially, of course, this segment:

The all-new and very excellent New Statesman website this week features an article by Joe Moran, whose book title I nicked for my series of talks on Reading the Everyday. Time, I think, to get in touch with Joe because with this article he’s brought our connections ever closer. His subject is the story of the M62.

Joe’s discovered some great references to the iconic stretch of road, including the Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage who says that the M62 ‘marks the true north, “where England tucks its shirt in its underpants”‘, John Shuttleworth who famously sang that he feels like The Man Who Lives (in the farm in the middle of) the M62, and the architect Will Alsop with his highly suggestive but to my mind dystopian fantasy Supercity (an unbroken band of urban life ribboning along the motorway all the way between Hull and Liverpool).

The main concern of Joe’s article is to revisit the founding vision of a liberating motorway which would cure all cross-pennine travel ills. Thirty-five years after the M62’s opening the reality is horrible congestion, ‘without the compensation of being iconically awful like the M25’. Joe points towards a future where tolls will change the habits of drivers, who might thus become better connected to the places currently bypassed by the M62 (including Leeds and Manchester which ‘don’t clamour for attention’ on the motorway’s signboards and Hull and Liverpool, of which the motorway stops short).

One assumption Joe makes is one I must challenge – the assumption about the direction of travel. The tendency is to read the motorway as west – east (‘The Road to Hull’ – very good, Tim C). But not so for me. As for Bill Drummond (see previous post) my waters tell me that it has to be east – west. The destination is the all important thing, and that just has to be Liverpool. Which of course gives me the opportunity, should I dare to take it, to subtitle this project To Hull and Back.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Why spend my sabbatical in 2007 walking the M62? Eliot’s verse offers one reason – travelling back home to Liverpool having spent two months slowly taking in the life and culture of Hull, Goole, Leeds, Halifax, Manchester, Warrington, and points inbetween, may just illuminate my thinking about my own context just in time for what should be a rich time of conversation, Capital of Culture year 2008.

The reason I’ve given my employers – the Church of England – and the grant-giving bodies I’m hoping will support me, is that my walk will be an investigation of An Urban Theology of Place in Northern England today. And that’s certainly another part of it.

Readers of my other blog know that I have spent the past two-and-a-half years since arriving in Norris Green doing what I call parish walks in our area, sometimes alone and sometimes with others, recording my observations and reflections, inviting on- and offline dialogue with the various readers – practitioners of urban walking, former or current residents of our parish, psychogeographers, street performers, urban theologians, and friends trying to extract some sanity from this mad business I’ve made my own.

I have presented papers on this experience to the Urban Theology Unit, Sheffield, and groups of colleagues in Liverpool. In April 2005 I ran a week’s retreat on Iona on the theme Healing Places. In 2006 my reflections led me into producing a series of talks / workshops on Reading the Everyday which variously ended up on mp3s from Greenbelt and as an article in Third Way.

So the M62 walk seemed a natural progression. The idea – to take two months walking back home from Hull roughly along the M62 corridor and to find people most days who will guide me on walks around their own area. They may be fellow-clerics, they may work in industry or commerce, they may be geographers, or psychogeographers or social historians or schoolchildren or journalists or bus drivers or artists. The idea is that through travelling and conversing with them I shall build up a rich picture of life along this route today. And then I’ll spend a further month collating all these reflections into a publication of some sort.

So that’s some way towards explaining why walk. But why walk the M62? Many people given the chance for three or four months away go somewhere exotic, you know like the Far East. But I’ve become increasingly convinced (helped by philosophers of travel like Alain de Botton) that the exotic is not a physical place but a state of mind. It’s not where you go so much as your mental attitude which determines your perception of a place. That’s how I can walk purposefully around the very ordinary streets of this Liverpool housing estate and find each time some new insight, new observation, new learning. And why the Far East of Humberside is as good a place as any, I reckon, to begin my exploration. Oh, all that plus the Bill Drummond thing:

I … got out of Hull and on to the most alluring, powerful, even magical motorway on our lump of an island. Even saying its name fills me with a longing. The M62. The greatest motorway ever made. Chuck Berry can keep his Route 66. Kerouac his two-lane black top, Paul Simon his New Jersey Turnpike, Billy Bragg his A13. Give me the M62. Driving it east to west is always best, especially at the close of the day into the setting sun….