Happy birthday Spaghetti Junction

I wrote this for the Guardian's Comment is Free site today:

Happy Birthday Spaghetti Junction, 40 today. As it enters middle age, it is worth reflecting on what the Gravelly Hill Interchange near Birmingham says about our changing cultural attitudes to roads. For when it was completed, it generated a certain amount of giddy excitement. A Burton-on-Trent coach firm ran guided tours to see it, and it featured as a scenic backdrop in the 1973 film musical Take Me High, in which Cliff Richard plays a merchant banker who lives on a canal barge in Birmingham. In one scene, with a moody instrumental of Moog synthesisers playing in the background, Cliff whooshes along the canals in a mini-hovercraft, admiring the new junction.

The big excitement 40 years ago was that Spaghetti Junction completed the missing “Midlands link” of the M6. In 1962 the minister for transport, Ernest Marples, had announced plans to complete a thousand miles of motorway in the next ten years. The target was met and Spaghetti Junction meant that motorists could get the full benefit of this thousand miles. Motoring journalists drove the 300 miles from London to the Scottish borders and reported back excitedly on this epic journey, made without meeting a traffic light or roundabout. One newspaper headline read, “I’ll take the Spaghetti road and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye”. Another, just in time for the late May bank holiday, read, “Spaghetting away from it all”.

But Spaghetti Junction was also finished just as the early excitement about motorways was curdling into disillusionment and anxiety about their effects on congestion and the environment. That is why, for such a complex junction, it is quite frugal with land, using just 30 acres. And of course the nickname it was immediately given is not especially flattering. The main thrust of the metaphor was that spaghetti just arranges itself as a series of random loops on a plate – which is how messy and unplanned the new junction seemed to the British sensibility. Motorists worried that they would drive round it in perpetuity, unable to find their way out. In fact, it is quite easy to navigate, and if you are driving through it on the M6, all you have to do is keep straight ahead.

The main problem with Spaghetti Junction’s image today is that its stanchions are made of that unloved material, concrete. As the signature material of the 1960s, concrete has become the scapegoat for more complex and intractable social failures. Concrete is now an all-purpose metaphor for the supposed planning disasters of that era - not just the flyovers but the related inner-city landscape of pedestrian subways and tower blocks. Many subways have since been replaced by footbridges, and the ceremonious dynamiting of high rises has been a common sight since the Thatcher era. But the flyovers cannot be demolished without creating traffic mayhem and were anyway, at least technically, a success, being durable, safe and easy to use. And so they have remained, as a stigmatic image embodying the false hopes of that era.

But there is no accounting for taste. “Seen from the air, the ribbons of curving carriageway seem to interlace with the pleasing intricacy of an Elizabethan knot garden,” enthused Clive Aslet, the conservationist and Country Life editor, about Spaghetti Junction in 2005. For a while today Spaghetti Junction was trending on Twitter, and the muddled affection apparent in some of the tweets was not always ironic. Perhaps, now the excitement of the motorway age is a distant memory, there is space for some double-edged nostalgia about its naive embrace of the future. Spaghetti Junction reminds us how long ago the third quarter of the twentieth century now seems - an era that Jonathan Meades calls “that brief and far off parenthesis when Britain was modern”.

Seven Up!

In 1964, Michael Apted worked as a researcher and assistant producer on a documentary for Granada TV called Seven Up! The programme, broadcast in May of that year, took fourteen children from diverse backgrounds: Neil and Peter, from a state school in a middle-class suburb of Liverpool; Nick, from a small village in the Yorkshire Dales where he was the only pupil in the schoolhouse; Sue, Lynn, Jackie and Tony, from elementary schools in London’s East End; Symon and Paul, from a Barnardo’s children’s home in Middlesex; Bruce, from a boarding school in Hampshire; and Andrew, Charles, John and Suzy, from exclusive, fee-paying day schools in London. With the programme’s director, Paul Almond, Apted talked to the children about their lives, interests and aspirations, and solicited their views on class, money, race, the opposite sex and school life. They were then brought together to be filmed on a day out in London, when they were treated to a party and a trip to the zoo, and were left to their own devices in an adventure playground. The aim of the programme, according to the narrator Douglas Keay, was to test the Jesuit maxim, ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man,’ and to provide ‘a glimpse of England in the year 2000’. Although it was initially envisaged as a one-off, Apted has returned to the project in various formats every seven years, following the children through from adolescence to middle age in five additional films: Seven Plus Seven (1970), Twenty-One (1977), 28 Up (1984), 35 Up (1991), 42 Up (1998), 49 Up (2005) and now 56 Up.

The introduction of lightweight 16mm film cameras and smaller, synchronous sound equipment in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the increasing speed of films which enabled most scenes to be filmed in natural light, allowed the documentarist to penetrate into previously unfilmable areas. These technological changes helped to create new forms of documentary-making in British Free Cinema, American Direct Cinema and French Cinéma Vérité, with an emphasis on location filming, spontaneity and intimacy rather than staged situations and didactic commentary.

Seven Up! was partly a product of these technological changes and their transition to television. The film offers unprecedented glimpses into the daily routines of children, albeit sometimes through reenactments. It shows Neil skipping down a suburban street in his duffle coat, and doing free movement to music in a PE lesson; Suzy surreptitiously scratching her nose in ballet class; John, Andrew and Charles singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in Latin; and Tony acting as milk monitor and being told off for turning round in a lesson. There are impressionistic snatches of children’s lives in the form of playground fights, skipping games, communal school dinners and the queue for Saturday morning pictures. In one scene, the camera even adopts Tony’s eye view as he moves across the schoolyard and into a line of pupils. The film thus attempts to use the new technological sophistication of documentary-making to examine children’s culture on its own terms, in the manner of Iona and Peter Opie’s influential book, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), which sees the initiation rites and secret languages of the playground as expressions of a tribal culture with its own hierarchies and meanings.

Laugh out loud

Glancing over something I wrote five years ago in my book Queuing for Beginners ...

Email occupied a confusing middle ground between the premeditation of a letter and the expressiveness of a phone call. To compensate for the absence of verbal intonation in email, early users of message boards used ‘emoticons’ and ‘smileys’ to denote things like ‘only joking’ and ‘happy,’ and acronyms such as LOL (laugh out loud, sometimes embarrassingly mistaken for ‘lots of love’).

... I must conclude, with a heavy heart, that the prime minister is not one of my regular readers.