Went to see a fantastic couple of films at the Barbican yesterday. There was a linking theme of domes and 'organic' structures as structures for utopian and outsider communities. It got me wondering when straight lines started to equal 'the man'. (Setting aside, for a minute, all that nonsense about 'there are no straight lines in nature'.)
Then, last night, I was reading On Roads by Joe Moran, which is excellent, and I suspect I'm going to be quoting lots of it. (Hopefully not so much as to cause offence.)
Mr Moran quotes Roger Deakin talking about how he hates the straightness of the M1. And then goes on;
"Deakin's dislike of the motorway's undeflecting line forms part of an enduring strain in English cultural criticism. Ever since enclosure commissioners realigned the old parish roads in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, running them along the new land boundaries, straight roads have been a symbol of political coercion. 'Improvement makes straight roads,' wrote William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 'but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.'...
...In the early years of the motor car, the poet and pioneering eco-critic Edward Thomas continued this war against the straight road, arguing that if we 'make roads outright and rapidly, for a definite purpose, they may perish as rapidly...and their ancient predecessors live on to smile at their ambition'. One of the first militant pedestrians, Thomas resented the bullying way in which the motor car was monopolising the highway and ironing out its creases, turning 'the road that sways with airy motion and bird-like curves' into a 'road cut by a skimping tailor'.
So far, very splendidly put but not entirely surprising. You'd expect the likes of Blake and Thomas to object to straightlineism. As Mr Moran points out:
'In the long tradition of English landscape criticism, the straight road remains a recurring motif of cold-hearted modernity. It is almost the reverse of the iconography of the American road, with its classic narrative of the road trip - which is all about escaping from the rhythms of mundane existence along the dead straight, two-lane blacktop stretching out into vanishing point.'
(It's also a tradition that ignores the magic of the moment when you chance across a length of pure, straight A or B-road after hours of winding around country lanes.)
A few pages on though, and Mr Moran introduces us to someone else, reading something else into the landscape:
"The most audacious attempt to impose a retrospective pattern on our road network was made by a sixty-six-year-old Herefordshire businessman called Alfred Watkins. On 30 June 1921, he was driving along a road in Blackwardine, a small village near Leominster, when he stopped his car to look at a map. Suddenly he had a vision of a series of allignments of human-made landmarks and natural features 'like a chain of fairy lights'. Watkins had discovered Blackwardine Ley, the first known leyline. His 1925 book, The Old Straight Track, argued that prehistoric trackways were built straight, using objects such as standing stones, tree clumps and hillside mounds as sighting points...He was a dedicated preservationist, deep patriot and anti-modern who had already published a broadside against decimalisation in 1919 titled Must We Trade in Tenths? He was as keen as any medieval historian to deny the Romans credit for inaugurating our road system. His book inspired an amateur army of leyline hunters and 'straight track clubs', sharing theories and arguing over what constituted a straight line."
I love that. I love that both the gentle curves of old English roads and the perfectly straight lines of surveyors-cum-soothsayers can be interpreted as signs of some deeper, ancient wisdom. (Especially when both ideas are further muddled by wooly-headed NewAgeists.) Maybe soon someone will discover an even more ancient curvy, knobbly pattern beneath the leylines - and so on, recurring.
Maybe that's one of the joys of the British landscape, it's so completely distant from it's 'climax vegetation', and so sat on by centuries of cultural stuff that you can look at it and find evidence for anything you want.
It doesn't help me though, to determine, conclusively, if straight lines = the man.
Anyway.