Platt - Leadville

I did not live in London until I was twenty-three, but I visited the city often when I was a child. In my mind, London is mapped through the roads that connect it to the parts of England where I have lived: the A11 to Essex, where I was born; the A1 to the north, where I grew up; the A3 to Hampshire, where I finished school; the A4 to Bristol, where I went to university. The fact that I now live in west London, close to Western Avenue the A40 completes my map of the citys roads.

Whenever I was driven into London, I watched the houses which lined the road: as the car travelled towards the centre of the city, the houses marched in the opposite direction; dirty and anonymous, pinched and choked by an endless, ragged chain of cars and lorries, they looked uninhabitable, yet the blackened cars parked on the pavements suggested otherwise. It seemed incredible that there were people living within ten yards of the car in which I was sitting.

One afternoon in January 1995, as I drove along Western Avenue, I did what I had never done before: I parked the car in a side-street, and walked on to the road. I found myself standing at the bottom of a valley, beside a set of traffic lights. The air tasted sugary, and the rhythm of the passing cars was hypnotic: each one drew me after it, seduced by the soft, cushioned violence of its motion, and it was only when it had gone that I realized how fast it was travelling; then it was too late another took its place, then another, each one becoming a blur of trailing colour, like a melted sweet, as it fell through the slotted mouth between the rows of terraced housing which lined the road. Dirty brown and oddly insubstantial, the houses seemed to have been moulded from damp cardboard, rather than brick and glass; some were derelict, others seemed to have been abandoned. There was no one in sight.

I began to read about the arterial roads. I discovered that most of them were constructed between the wars, during a building boom which transformed the landscape of Britain. Four million homes were built between 1921 and 1936, as the city centre slums were demolished, and their inhabitants relocated to the outskirts of town. The population of central London fell by 400,000, but more than a million people moved into the new houses on its periphery. In the vast new wildernesses of glass and brick on the edge of town, the entrenched patterns of English life were thought to be changing. Everything and everybody is being rushed down and swept into one dusty arterial road of cheap mass production and standardised living, wrote J.B. Priestley, in English Journey, an account of his travels around England in 1933. He believed a cleaner, tidier, healthier, saner world than we had known before was being systematically assembled on the edge of Englands cities and so did George Orwell: The place to look for the germs of the future England is in light-industry areas and along the arterial roads, he wrote in 1941. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of the great towns the old pattern is gradually changing into something new.

In 1995, I was working as a freelance journalist. I have never had a full-time job, and I had never wanted one; I preferred to work from my home in Shepherds Bush, which meant Western Avenue lay within easy reach. The houses I had seen beside the road had begun to preoccupy me; I wanted to know if Orwell had chosen the right place to look for Englands future. I decided to go back to Western Avenue.

If I have learnt anything as a journalist, it is that I can usually persuade people to talk to me. I did not know what I would find on Western Avenue, but I came to a decision: I would visit each of the houses beside the road, I would talk to the people who live in them, and I would collect their stories.

Western Avenue begins at a junction called Western Circus. Within a hundred yards, the houses begin their steady march: suburban villas line each side of the road as it travels west, climbing steadily for half a mile before it crosses a railway bridge. Here, advertising hoardings flank the road; as it banks through a gentle turn, the cars pass between giant advertisements for other cars faster, glossier cars than those stalled in the queues of traffic. The road passes more houses on the left and a modern block of flats on the right, crosses another bridge, passes a garage and begins to descend to a junction called Gipsy Corner. There are houses on the left, and factories and workshops on the right; the road widens to six lanes, and the traffic picks up speed, until it rips through Gipsy Corner at sixty or seventy miles an hour.

This is the point where I had first walked on Western Avenue. Two weeks after my first visit, I returned to Gipsy Corner and began calling at the houses beside the road.

And above all, it is your civilisation, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time... Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn

Up till 1900 no-one had any idea, even the faintest notion, of the phenomenon about to burst on the world. First came the motorcar; then the air-plane... And all the time the universal use of machinery continues to produce its consequences.

Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow

The worst times are the summer afternoons, when the flood of traffic on Western Avenue thickens and congeals into a fetid stew of metal which clogs the road and gums up the air. Sometimes, Trevor Dodd wants to rush out and smash the cars with a hammer. Everyones beeping, everyones bad-tempered, its hot, its hard to breathe, its stinking with all the exhausts... its just a wind-up. He rests his hands on the window-ledge overlooking Western Avenue and then runs a finger along the glass; it comes away smeared with dirt. Look how filthy the window gets, he adds, disdainfully.

The glass vibrates gently, in tune with the traffic on the road beneath us; it is Saturday afternoon, and the cars flow freely through Gipsy Corner. As Trevor begins to introduce me to the horrors of life beside an urban motorway, there is a kind of pride in his voice. Its dirty, its dusty in the summer, and if its raining, the whole place goes brown its like this misty cloud all over the road. Walk up to the shops and you get covered in dirty spray; stand out there by the traffic lights and you get blown around the lorries come screaming through the junction at seventy miles an hour, and you actually get moved off your feet.

Enthused by the ugliness of his neighbourhood, he is, already, unrecognizable from the hostile, suspicious man who had answered the door five minutes ago. Hed had reason to be suspicious I had come to call at his house unannounced and uninvited; he had no idea why I was there, and I was not sure I could explain it properly myself. 227 Western Avenue was the third house I visited. I had begun, randomly, at 213 Western Avenue a house which stands to the west of Gipsy Corner, in the shadow of the car supermarket which straddles the junction. A dirty sheet hung in the window beside the front door, and the garden was sown with thick, pale grass. It was almost a relief when there was no answer to my knock. For some reason, approaching the houses beside the road made me nervous.