HAL is

'A new look at the English landscape': landscape architecture, movement and the aesthetics of motorways in early postwar Britain Peter Merriman Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

In the past decade or so geographers have been arguing for more performative, practice-oriented and non-representational accounts of the ways in which people encounter, move through and inhabit landscapes, spaces and places. In this paper I argue that these theoretical concerns should also prompt geographers to explore the fairly long history of critical commentaries and aesthetic interventions by writers, artists, film-makers and landscape practitioners who have shown a sensibility to movement and embodied practices in the landscape. The paper then examines how landscape architects focused their attention on the movements, speed and visual perspective of vehicle drivers in their arguments for the landscaping and design of motorways in early postwar Britain. During the 1940s the Institute of Landscape Architects pushed for the involvement of their members in the landscaping and planting of all future roads, and prominent landscape architects criticized the tendency of local authorities and organizations such as the Roads Beautifying Association to plant ornamental trees and shrubs which would interrupt the flow of the landscape and distract drivers travelling at speed. Landscape architects such as Brenda Colvin, Sylvia Crowe and Geoffrey Jellicoe argued for a focus on simplicity, flow and the visual perspective of drivers, and the government's Advisory Committee on the Landscape Treatment of Trunk Roads applied similar criticisms to the work of Sir Owen Williams and Partners in designing and landscaping the earliest sections of Britain's first major motorway, the London to Yorkshire Motorway or Ml. The paper examines how landscape architects pushed for a functional modernism to be constructed around the movements and speed of motorists, and it concludes by discussing how an admiration for foreign motorways was tempered by calls for a British motorway modernism reworked in regional and local settings.

... there are two different things at stake here: styles of motorway design, and styles of seeing.' jn his 1972 article 'New way north', Reyner Banham reviewed the near-complete chain of motorways linking London and Scotland. Amidst his reflections on the design of - and experience of driving along -the different stretches of motorway, Banham was critical of 'the conventional vision' which 'fails to notice the ... virtues' of the landscapes of the motorway, and fails to understand the moving viewpoint and 'plunging perspective' of car travel.2 Driving a car was seen to enact very different experiences and sensory engagements to those associated with either a stationary viewer or the more 'detached', 'passive' passenger who gazes at the 'continuous panorama' framed by the side windows of trains or stage coaches. 3 Banham's article is important because it indicates how more recent academic concerns with the mobile gazewhich have built upon the writings of philosophers and historians of modern vision4 _can be situated in a fairly long history of critical commentaries, explorations and aesthetic interventions by writers, artists, academics, landscape practitioners, engineers, dancers, musicians and film-makers who have explored the relations and tensions between landscape, movement, practice, vision and being in the landscape in their attempts to provide artistic works or practical landscaping solutions.

This genealogy of sensibilities to movement in the landscape may also prompt academics to widen their readings of recent calls by geographers, anthropologists and architects for more performative, practice-oriented and non-representational accounts of the ways in which people encounter, move through and inhabit landscapes, spaces and places.5 Thus while the 'challenge for cultural geographers of landscape' may be 'to produce geographies that are lived, embodied, practised; landscapes which are never finished or complete, not easily framed or read',6 there is clearly a need for cultural and historical geographers to trace these genealogies of sensibilities to movement and embodied practices in the landscape through the written texts and performances of others, as well as utilizing more engaging and participative methods to encounter landscapes and perform or communicate their geographies to different audiences.7 It is worthwhile to briefly outline some of these earlier artistic, architectural and authorial engagements with the dynamism of moving through the landscape.

In his 1958 essay 'The abstract world of the hot-rodder', J.B. Jackson -who wrote widely on the vernacular geographies of the roadside strips and suburban landscapes of the USA -provided the readers of his journal, Landscape, with a quasi- phenomenological description of the experience of moving through the landscape at speed. Jackson reflected on the importance of different views of the landscape and the excitement of the thrill-seeking hot-rodder or sportsman, who enters a world of his own, new and at the same time intensely personal; a world of flowing movement, blurred light, rushing wind or water; he feels the surface beneath him, hears the sound of his progress, and has a tense rapport with his vehicle. With this comes a sensation of at last being part of the visible world, and its center. [START_REF] Jackson | The abstract world of the hot-rodder[END_REF] Jackson's landscape vernacular arose from a 'distrust of formal theory', a concern with the symbolism of landscapes and a passion for driving across the American landscape in his truck and on his motorcycle.9 At the same time, however, American architects and landscape architects saw the need for more formal and diagrammatic techniques for notating the viewpoints and experiences of drivers so that more universal design principles could be distilled and codified. In the early 1960s Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John Myer's pioneering architectural study The view from the road used notations of movement and visual sequences along Boston's urban expressways in an attempt to show how well-designed roads could 'make our vast metropolitan areas accessible', with 'a dramatic play of space and motion, of light and texture, all on a new scale '.10 In the mid-1960s landscape architect Lawrence Halprin utilized techniques from modern dance choreography -which were used by his wife, the well-known avant-garde dancer, Ann Halprinto develop a form of movement notation that would help him understand the movements and experiences of vehicle drivers traversing the landscape.1" In a very different context -late 18th-and early 19th-century Britain - Humphry Repton expressed his belief that well-designed roads could compose 'parkland into pictorial scenes, both in the view of the road and from it'.12 In the 19th century, commentators discussed the visual experiences and sensibilities associated with dioramas, panoramas and rail travel -which were felt to cut against picturesque ways of framing and viewing the landscape -while artists, photographers and film-makers have long been engaging with experiences of mobility and reflecting upon the aesthetic and non-representational dimensions of movement and travel.13 The Landscape exhibition organized by the British Council in 1998 included a series of landscape paintings by Paul Winstanley of the view from a moving car, as well as Rachel Lowe's video installation Letter to an unknown person no. 6, in which a hand traces the visual features of a passing landscape onto the side window of a car, highlighting the futility of attempting to fix such visual impressions, and questioning 'the possibility of representation'.14

Artists have engaged with the embodied movements and viewpoints of the motorist and traveller in many other ways, and what these different practical, aesthetic and philosophical interventions have tended to refract is a belief in the futility or impossibility of trying to capture the dynamism or producing realist representations of movements which have been assuming a greater significance in people's everyday lives for several centuries. Nevertheless, artists have responded by trying to express the dynamism of the driver's view through a windscreen using paint. Designers have developed new notation techniques for recording and choreographing the visual sequences along a stretch of road. Writers have reflected upon the embodied, phenomenological aspects of travelling through the landscape. In this paper I focus on one particular moment in this history of sensibilities to, or engagements with, mobile practices in the landscape: the debates surrounding the landscaping of motorways in early postwar Britain.

In the first section of the paper I examine the work of members of the Institute of Landscape Architects (ILA) in early postwar Britain, focusing on debates surrounding the landscaping and planting of the nation's roads and motorways. While there is a fairly extensive critical literature on the role of architects, planners and designers in Britain's post-war reconstruction,15 and on the landscaping of the German autobahns and American parkways and freeways,16 very little has been written about the work of landscape architects -on and off the road -in early postwar Britain.17 I examine how the ILA attempted to position landscape architecture at the heart of plans for postwar reconstruction, and how figures such as Brenda Colvin, Sylvia Crowe and Geoffrey Jellicoe emphasized the vital role that landscape architects could play in the design of Britain's future motorway network. Landscape architects explored how the driver's mobile viewpoint and a range of English landscape traditions must form the basis for contemporary motorway designs, and they contrasted their holistic approach with the narrow horticultural concerns of groups such as the Roads Beautifying Association. In section two I examine the work of the government's Advisory Committee on the Landscape Treatment of Trunk Roads and prominent landscape architects in attempting to influence the design and planting of the earliest sections of the London-Yorkshire Motorway (Ml), which were opened to the public on 2 November 1959. The Ml was Britain's first major motorway -built at a time of rising prosperity and increasing levels of car ownership -and the design, construction, and experience of driving along the motorway was seen to be exciting and modern in the late 1950s and early 1960s.18

Nevertheless, architects and landscape architects were highly critical of the architecture and planting proposals for this largely experimental motorway. The Landscape Advisory Committee cast a critical eye over the planting schedules proposed by the engineer's landscape consultants, and they blocked proposals for ornamental species of tree and shrub which they felt to be too detailed, small-scale and distracting to be appreciated by the motorist travelling at high speed. Landscape architects remarked upon the absence of a sense of visual flow and movement in the landscapes of Ml, and they criticized the landscaping and planting of the motorway service areas which did not account for the tastes, experiences and movements of different kinds of motorist.

Landscape architecture and the modern road

In matters conceming landscape and gardens in Britain it seems that the advice of the gardener, or of some commercial firm, or even an amateur is still considered good enough by self respecting Public Bodies who would quite appreciate the need for professional advice in matters conceming architecture, engineering or health. The profession of Landscape Architecture has yet to reach the point where it is felt to be indispensable in its own field. [START_REF] Colvin | Presidential address[END_REF] Amidst the planning conferences and public debates about reconstruction which flourished during the Second World War, prominent figures in the Institute of Landscape Architects attempted to broaden their profession's sphere of influence. During the early 1940s an increasing number of architects and planners were elected as members of the Institute -including Patrick Abercrombie, Lord Reith, Clough Williams- Ellis, Thomas Sharp and Dudley Stamp -which sought to move away from its prewar image as a 'domestic garden society'.20 At a meeting to discuss ILA policy in November 1942 -which was attended by representatives of planning, architecture, horticulture and amenity groups -the Vice-President of the Institute, Lady Allen of Hurtwood, stressed that future emphasis must be placed on 'the social value of our profession in a democratic age', as landscape architecture had previously 'been too closely identified with designing and making private gardens and estates'. Landscape architecture must be conceived as 'a new national service', and central and local government and other organizations must recognize the role that the profession could play in shaping the nation's public spaces.2' Landscape architecture was aligned with the prevailing 'planner-preservationist imagination',,22 and with the end of hostilities landscape architects started to gain commissions to work on major public projects, including new towns and the Festival of Britain sites.23 As building restrictions were lifted in the early 1950s, and construction work diversified throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, landscape architects won commissions to landscape new university campuses, schools, forestry plantations, reservoirs, factories, power stations and housing estates. The ILA also sought involvement for its members in the landscaping and design of roads. Atlee's Labour government had announced its plans to reconstruct the national road network in May 1946,24 but with ongoing economic crises and a focus on essential reconstruction work due to shortages of building materials and labour, the highways programme was shelved until the mid-1950s. Despite these cutbacks the Institute of Landscape Architects joined other organizations in working to ensure that landscape architects would be employed alongside engineers to lay out all future roads and motorways.

One of the key campaigners was Brenda Colvin, a founding member of the British Association of Garden Architects in 1928 (which became the ILA in 1929), who served as President of the Institute of Landscape Architects between 1951 and 1953.25 In the Institute's journal, Landscape and garden, in 1939 Colvin criticized the prevailing British obsession with trying to "'beautify" the road', arguing that planting must be used 'to knit the highway into the landscape':

unfortunately most of the planting that is being done still shows a misunderstanding of the principles involved, and an almost pathetic lack of vision. The logic of much of it seems to be based on the assumption that since flowering trees and shrubs are pretty and excite our admiration, the more of these and the greater the number of varieties we plant along the roads the more the roads will be 'beautified'.26 While Colvin doesn't name those who are doing the misplanting, contemporary readers may have guessed that she was referring to the work of the Roads Beautifying Association (RBA), whose horticultural experts had been advising local councils on roadside planting since 1928.27 The RBA had produced planting schemes for many of the new bypasses and arterial roads constructed during the interwar years -including the Kingston bypass, Winchester bypass and Mickleham bypass. At one level their views do not appear that different from those of Brenda Colvin, for while she stressed that exotic trees and flowering shrubs may be appropriate for urban areas -where speeds are inevitably slower and the scale more domestic28 the Roads Beautifying Association stated their commitment to ensuring that only 'wild species' would be planted along country roads, and that 'garden hybrids and varieties' would be limited to urban or semi-urban areas.29 Despite such assurances, the RBA came under heavy criticism from commentators who the Association's secretary, Wilfrid Fox, termed the 'pure English school': those who think that the scenery of England is so beautiful that if you make any changes or additions you are ruining the picture and that only trees and shrubs indigenous to England should be employed to adorn roads ... 30 Fox argued that the Association were progressive modernizers continuing the work of several centuries of enlightened landowners and gardeners who had brought horticultural variety to the English landscape, but while he justified their planting policy in horticultural and ecological terms, he overlooked the criticisms of landscape architects such as Colvin who argued that the RBA took no account of the speed of vehicles, the experience of moving through the landscape and the aesthetics and overall landscape design of the road:

Travelling at anything over thirty miles an hour, the details of flower and leaf count for very little; form and mass, light and shadow are the materials we must make use of, and these are also the requirements from the point of view of the more distant observer in the countryside.31 As Colvin stated in her 1948 book Land and landscape, beautiful modern roads would only result from a 'more fundamental' approach to landscape than the largely horticultural approach adopted by the Roads Beautifying Association.32 Landscape architects and engineers should ensure that modern dual carriageway roads are 'fitted' to the contours and existing features of the landscape, so that the road 'will seem to belong happily to its surroundings' and the driver will be kept interested and enlivened.33 Landscaping and planting must be functional: breaking the 'mechanical monotony of engine sound and road surface', keeping drivers 'alert and vigilant', preventing dazzle, framing attractive views, screening eyesores and breaking up the parallelism of the road.34 Colvin stressed that the danger was one of doing too much, in too much detail: the 'English have become too garden-city minded'.35 Small-scale ornamental plants might be suited to gardens 'seen at a walking pace', but the 'dramatic variations' characteristic of the English countryside would 'too easily be blurred and lost to the motorist by a lavish use of trees and shrubs of exotic or garden type', which would also prove costly to maintain. Local or regional vegetation could best highlight Britain's 'natural landscape variety', while the speeds and scale of modern motoring were ideal for the modern motorist to appreciate the beauty and regional variations of the nation's landscape.36 Movement and speed are seen to be vitally important to the way we see, encounter and inhabit Britain's landscapes, and the role of the landscape architect and engineer must be to translate the speed, scale and function of a particular road into an appropriate landscape.

Colvin's friend and fellow landscape architect Sylvia Crowe provided a more extensive discussion of these themes in her 1960 book 7he landscape of roads, and both authors were keen to present solutions to landscape problems.37 While Ian Nairn's highly influential 1955 Outrage special issue of the Architectural review had presented a rather gloomy account of the spread of a universal suburbia or 'subtopia' across the English landscape and along England's roads, Crowe's writings presented the architecture, planning and design community with positive examples of how modern industry, reservoirs, power stations and new roads could be fitted into, and even enhance, the landscape.38 Her 1956 book Tomorrow's landscape was presented by the architectural critic Eric de Mar6 as a 'practical guide to the proper adjustment of our landscape' and as the first constructive reply to Nairn's 'prophecy of doom'. 39 Crowe suggested that while modern structures were frequently built on a vast scale, divorced from our humanized landscape, 'we are faced with the alternatives of either linking them by siting and design with the existing scale or of creating around them a new landscape related to their own scale'.40 In the case of roads it was the speed for which they were designed to be traversed which would, above all else, affect the scale of the road and its place in the landscape:

The faster the speed for which it is designed, the further it must depart from the old pattem of the humanized landscape. This conflict between machine speed and human speed is part of the problem which confronts us throughout our mechanized civilization.41

As driving speeds increase, the landscape of the road must become more expansive, coherent and free from excessive detail and distractions. The challenge becomes one of composing a landscape which can be viewed or 'read' at speed, and Crowe suggested that landscape architects could learn a great deal from previous landscape and artistic traditions that developed 'principles of penetration and the moving viewpoint'.42 Crowe placed two artistic traditions in contrast to the 'static' viewpoints of the 'classic conception of a landscape': modern painting and sculpture which exploits the strong directional line exploring the depths of a composition, ..J.and] the English landscape school [which] developed the older Chinese conception of a landscape of movement, to be enjoyed as an unfolding scroll.43 By placing the modern motorway in this history of sensibilities to movement in landscape art and design, Crowe suggests not only that these traditions may provide 'a valid starting point' for landscape architects and engineers designing the modern road, but that the landscape architect and their finished landscapes are continuing a longestablished artistic tradition.44

Crowe's genealogy of landscape design appears to owe much to a paper on the landscaping and design of motorways by her friend, and Past President of the Institute of Landscape Architects, Geoffrey Jellicoe.45 Jellicoe had opened his address to the Town Planning Institute in 1958 with a critical discussion of the landscaping and design of motor roads in Germany and the USA, before stressing that the most important lessons would be learned from 'our own traditions and national characteristics', which are 'nowhere better expressed in Landscape than in the great English park'.46 Jellicoe, like Crowe, provided a somewhat compressed and oversimplified history of English landscape design. He pointed to the important lessons of the 'art of the picturesque' before describing how the work of Humphry Repton is instructive for today's landscape architect; for it was he who taught us that 'a road that is agreeable to drive along, is also agreeable as static scenery in the surrounding landscape'. 47 As Stephen Daniels has shown, the mobilities of late 18th-and early 19th-century polite society -when Repton was conducting his work -became associated with new techniques for not only designing but also experiencing and conducting oneself in the landscape;48 butJellicoe stresses that while Repton sees the road as essentially 'subsidiary to the park, ... in modern England it is the road that organizes the landscape through which it passes'.49

Twentieth-century landscape architects argued that motorways must be designed around the movements and embodied vision of the high-speed motorist and composed from specific features on a site; but Jellicoe also outlined a number of basic visual effects which appealed to the human eye and could be adjusted to the scale of any road. These effects were seen to be present in a 19th-century watercolour, 7he shadowed road (Figure 1), by the Norwich School painter John Crome (1768-1821), which reveals 'a complex of tree foliage, the incident of a cottage, the glimpse of a distant view, and an overall play of light and shade'.50 While Jellicoe acknowledged that the picture was composed on an inappropriate scale for a motorway, he argued that the landscape architect merely had to translate the scene to the dimensions, scale and speeds of a modern road. The architectural critic Raymond Spurrier wondered whether Britain's highway engineers would pay any attention to Jellicoe's suggestions, as 'the average landscape of the average motor road in Britain' exhibited none of the compositional elements present in The shadowed road.51 Britain's modern roads were badly aligned, boring, and adorned with poorly designed signs and vegetation, and there were few positive British roads to which landscape commentators could turn for inspiration. Crowe praised the siting and engineering of -but not the planting carried out by the Roads Beautifying Association on -the Mickleham bypass and Bix-Henley road,52 while Jellicoe lauded the designers of the Oxford bypass for their separation of dual carriageways, incorporation of existing trees and hedges, and creation of FIGURE 1 The shadowed road, c.1808-10. Watercolour by John Crome (1768-1821). The painting is usually titled Landscape with cottages. (Reproduced by permission of V&A Images/ Victoria and Albert Museum, London.) 'a scenery of the highest order'.53 A photograph of the Oxford bypass by Geoffrey Jellicoe's wife, Susan, was included in his article and in Crowe's 7be landscape ofroads with admiring captions, while a sketch which appears to be based upon this photograph was presented by Raymond Spurrier as 'the Shadowed Road -modern style' (Figure 2): the antidote to the average British road.54

The alignment of the views of Jellicoe, Crowe and the Architectural review writer Raymond Spurrier in their optimistic hope that contemporary landscape architects, engineers and designers could create modern motorways inspired by English landscape traditions is not surprising. While Jellicoe's approach to landscape design drew upon such diverse influences as modern abstract art, sculpture and, from the early 1960s, Jungian psychology,55 the approaches that he, Crowe and Colvin proposed for landscaping Britain's roads and motorways had notable parallels with arguments about the importance of picturesque theories to the planning and design of Britain's townscapes and landscapes, which key figures associated with the Architectural Review had been developing from the early 1940s.56 Nikolaus Pevsner, Hubert de Chronin Hastings, J.M. Richards and Gordon Cullen argued that 18th-century picturesque principles could provide a useful precedent for contemporary town planners, architects and landscape architects; showing how they might compose informal and varied layouts, views and relational compositions by using the materials - and respecting the distinctive design aesthetics -'found' on a particular site.57 While earlier proponents of the picturesque had presented movement and travel as antithetical to picturesque ways of seeing and experiencing the world, movement lay 7, the ShadowedRoad-nioder style. Divided carriage- zways welded together with the landscape by planting and landform., and by light, shade, and texture.

M~~~~~~~ FIGURE 2 '

The Shadowed Road -modern style'. Illustration accompanying an article by Raymond Spurrier. (Reproduced by permission of The architectural review.) at the heart of neo-picturesque formulations of townscape and landscape. Just as Jellicoe thought about how drivers would encounter and move through the recomposed landscape of The shadowed road (modern style), 20th-century reformula- tions of the picturesque were framed as an opportunity to understand mobile encounters with 'the embodied, the differentiated, the phenomenal world'.58 The Architectural review described how the picturesque layout of the South Bank site of the Festival of Britain -which was widely celebrated by admirers of the picturesque, and highly criticized by Brutalist architects and critics such as Reyner Banham -was 'contrived for the benefit of the moving, not the stationary, spectator',59 while in 1956 the Review's art editor, Gordon Cullen, pointed to the need to understand 'vision in motion' and establish a clear visual design code in order that roads may be considered as townscape or landscape.60

Drawing upon histories of landscape design, modern art and highway engineering, Colvin, Crowe and Jellicoe provided persuasive accounts of principles for designing and landscaping roads and motorways, but as high-profile landscape architects they also attempted to influence local and national government policy. During the Second World War Brenda Colvin prepared Treesfor town and country, a guide to aid postwar reconstruction which included sections on roadside and street planting and was published for the Association of Planning and Regional Reconstruction in 1947.61 The previous year she had chaired an Institute of Landscape Architects committee and prepared their report on Roads in the landscape.62 Between 1949 and 1954 she served as the Institute's representative on a Council for the Preservation of Rural England committee concerned with the landscaping of roads,63 while in 1955 she was appointed as the Institute's representative on the government's newly established Advisory Committee on the Landscape Treatment of Trunk Roads. The Landscape Advisory Committee, as they were commonly known, included such key figures as Clough Williams-Ellis (Council for the Preservation of Rural Wales), George Langley-Taylor (CPRE), Lord Rosse, Wilfrid Fox (RBA), Lord Bolton (Royal Forestry Society of England and Wales), Sir Eric Savill (Deputy Ranger, Windsor Great Park) and Dr George Taylor (Keeper of Botany, British Museum). At the Committee's inaugural meeting in April 1956, their chairman, Sir David Bowes-Lyon -President of the Royal Horticultural Society, and brother of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother -expressed his hope that they would 'advocate the use of indigenous trees and discourage the use of foreign trees ... which were uncharacteristic of the region'.64 This approach echoed the principles of such organizations as the ILA and CPRE and was implicitly critical of the work of the RBA, and after just four meetings, one site visit, and an argument over central reservation planting, Wilfrid Fox resigned -citing his fundamentally different 'outlook' from 'the Chairman and other vocal members of the committee' as the reason.65 The Committee's preference for indigenous, native species resonates with the push in Nazi Germany to plant native German species along the Autobahnen in Germany and Poland, but the discussions in 1950s Britain reflected ongoing debates amongst horticulturists, ecologists and landscape architects about the abilities of different plant species to survive and look right in the English landscape, rather than entwining exclusionary nationalist political ideologies with debates about landscape, ecology and race.66

The Landscape Advisory Committee's first major project was to approve the detailed designs and planting for the initial sections of Britain's first major motorway, the London to Yorkshire motorway (Ml). The route and preliminary designs had been established by the consulting engineers Sir Owen Williams and Partners during 1954 and 1955;67 and as civil servants were concerned that the project might be delayed, the Committee were instructed to focus their attention on the more superficial aspects of design and planting.68 This decision spurred the Institute of Landscape Architects to pressure the government to appoint qualified landscape consultants to advise on the design of the Ml and all future motorways. Geoffrey Jellicoe used his role as a Royal Fine Art Commissioner to ensure that the Commission's secretary pressed the Ministry on this matter,69 which led government officials and Sir Owen Williams and Partners to hold a meeting to discuss suitable appointments with the President of the ILA (Richard Sudell) and Jellicoe in July 1956.70 After discovering the recommended fees for landscape architects, it was eventually decided that the consulting engineers should employ their own consultants, and this decision -coupled with Sir Owen's appointment of two foresters, A.P. Long and AJ.M. Clay, rather than qualified landscape architects - resulted in a barrage of letters to the government and newspapers from the Institute of Landscape Architects, Royal Fine Art Commission, and Royal Institute of British Architects.7' In a letter published in 7The Times in May 1959, the then President of the Institute of Landscape Architects, Sylvia Crowe, stated that the Landscape Advisory Committee was no 'substitute for built-in professional advice', and that 'those trained to assess the character of a landscape' must form an important part of the planning team 'from the reconnaissance stage onwards'.72 The Ministry of Transport eventually appointed a landscape architect, Michael Porter, to their staff in 1961, but this was too late for the first sections of the Ml.

'A new look at the English landscape': the design and planting of the Ml motorway A road is a flow channel; its virtues will be those of smoothness and easy flow -minimum changes of velocity in any direction. Its visual virtues will be similar; no abruptness, no interruption, no fussiness, until the road superimposes its own slow steady rhythm of turnout, service area and major destination on to the undertones of change of geology and land use. [START_REF] Aj | The London/York motorway: an engineer's view[END_REF] In his review of the Ml for the Architects' journal, civil engineer Alan Harris captured the emphasis of a broad range of landscape architects on the importance of a sense of flow and a mobile viewpoint in designing the landscapes of roads and motorways. With almost no involvement by the Landscape Advisory Committee or qualified landscape architects in the detailed design of the Ml, it is not surprising that commentators stressed that the first sections of the motorway lacked the characteristics of a good modern motorway landscape. In The landscape of .roads Sylvia Crowe compared the poor design of the Ml with the positive landscaping on the Ulm to Baden-Baden Autobabn in Germany (Figure 3). While the German motor road is seen to have a 'fluid plasticity', 'smooth transition between road and countryside' and landforms which are shaped and related to the surrounding landscape, the Ml is held to be afflicted by harsh, angular lines and landforms that act as a 'jarring element', divorcing the road from the landscape.74 Flow and movement emerge as positive aspects of the aesthetics of landscape, which Crowe and others contrast with the negative interruptions, disruptions and angular jarring effects of a poorly designed motorway. The routing of the Ml through the 'Midlands Plain' had made it likely that it would interrupt the 'intricate and flowing landscape' of the area, but Crowe stressed that many of the disruptive forms and features of the motorway could have been avoided with appropriate landscaping.75

In 'The London-Birmingham motorway: a new look at the English landscape', which appeared in the Geographical magazine in October 1959, Brenda Colvin criticized the 'hard sharp lines and clumsy angles' of the motorway embankments, before focusing on Sir Owen Williams and Partners' distinctive standardized, concrete two-span over- bridges (Figure 4), which 'seem very heavy in design': The central supporting pillar spoils the flow of open view under the arch, and the solid concrete parapet increases the apparent depth of the arch and the sense of its weight to an extent which is all the more oppressive because so frequent. [START_REF] Colvin | The London-Birmingham motorway: a new look at the English landscape[END_REF] At a time when many engineers were designing light, unobtrusive, clean-lined pre- stressed concrete bridges -with open metal rails replacing a solid parapet -Sir Owen's reinforced concrete over-bridges were criticized by a broad array of architects, engineers, and landscape architects. The central supporting columns, solid parapets and reinforced concrete design had been adopted for reasons of cost and speed of construction, and Sir Owen defended their design by stating that 'they have a shape that will always be remembered',77 and that they were characteristic of the modern era: 'in the design of the structures ... regard had been paid to the spirit of the age, to the genius of the age. They were in a bold, massive manner.'78 In his presidential address to the Royal Institute of British Architects in November 1959, Basil Spence -a member of the Bridges Committee of the Royal Fine Art Commission and the architect of Coventry Cathedralexplained how the 'breadth and strength' of the bridges reminded him 'of some of the great Roman works'.79 Few architectural commentators repeated his praises.

Sylvia Crowe suggested that the bridges were rather 'static' when compared with the light Autobahn bridges, appearing as 'rough knots' in the landscape, and providing 'a visual check' on the sense of flow in the landscape.80 This need for movement and continuity was seen to work in several directions, and Crowe argued that Sir Owen's bridges impeded the flow of the landscape both along and across the motorway: they divided the landscape between one side of the road and the other and gave the impression that they were impeding the passage of traffic ...81

Members of the Landscape Advisory Committee expressed concern 'at the heavy appearance of the bridges' after a visit to the motorway in May 1959,82 while Brenda Colvin's replacement on the Committee, President of the ILA James Adams, was critical of the 'brutal bridges in careless contexts'.83 Alan Harris criticized the 'surpassing ugliness' of the over-bridges,84 and Ian Nairn -author of Outrage and assistant editor of the Architectural review -criticized the bulk and mass of the bridges in a reference to 'Sir Owen Williams's deplorable attempts to outdo Vanbrugh'.85 An array of other commentators renowned for their quite different attitudes to modern architecture also voiced criticisms of the bridges. Reyner Banham, the architecture and design critic who detailed the rise of New Brutalist architecture in 1950s Britain, was especially hostile to the design of Sir Owen's 'coarse, cheap bridges' which announced 'the ugliest piece of motor road in the world'.86 Sir Owen Williams had designed some of Britain's most celebrated modernist structures of the interwar years -including the Boots 'wets' factory at Beeston, Nottingham -but while he was 'one of the white hopes' of the British Modern Movement in the 1930s, Banham felt that his postwar constructions had been a great disappointment to a new generation of British architects and critics (notably the Brutalists).87 His prewar functional structures, 'unsullied by aesthetic intentions', had been displaced by a 'deliberately anti-aesthetic' approach in his post- war motorway work.88

Writing from a very different critical position in his 'Men and buildings' column in the Daily Telegraph, the poet, conservationist and architectural commentator John Betjeman referred to the landscaping and bridges on the Ml as 'matters of lasting regret'. Betjeman's rival broadcaster, guidebook writer and architectural commentator Nikolaus Pevsner, added to the barrage of critical writings and reviews in introductions to his guides to Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire in the Buildings of England series:

Sir Owen Williams evidently wanted to impress permanence on us, and permanence is a doubtful quality in devices connected with vehicles and means of transport. Elegance, lightness, and resilience might have been preferable . .. On the motorway elegance was arrived at only in the foot-bridges. Even retaining walls, revetments, etc., are of concrete blocks. ... So the Motorway is MODERN ARCHITECTrURE only with reservations. [START_REF] Pevsner | On the rivalry between, and differing architectural viewpoints of, Betjeman and Pevsner[END_REF] As the bridges were some of the only 20th-century modernist structures in the Northamptonshire guide, Pevsner was concerned that they might be seen to be typical of the capitalized category/style 'MODERN ARCHITECTURE'. Pevsner, like Banham, Crowe, Colvin, Jellicoe and Nairn, was quite clear that modern architecture and modern bridges could be attractive and well-designed, but their design must reflect an appropriate, contemporary, functional modernism, and their form and presence must not impede the movement and flow of the landscape.

Landscape architects could do little about the design of the bridges, but they did suggest techniques for integrating the motorway's structures into their surroundings and maintaining the visual flow of the landscape. Sylvia Crowe explained how 'the functional use of planting [could] produce the link between the landscape of speed and the landscape of nature', and how 'massed planting' could improve 'the bad shape of the banks and the appearance of the bridges'.91 Functional planting could help unify the motorway and the landscape, reinstating a sense of flow and guiding the driver's vision in an appropriate manner. Planting could screen unsightly views and help prevent monotony and boredom, but Brenda Colvin stressed that without the influence of the Landscape Advisory Committee and Royal Fine Art Commission the Ml may have 'had a ribbon of Forsythia and other garden shrubs on the central reserve... and subtopian decoration on side reserves and embankments'.92 Colvin and other members of the Landscape Advisory Committee had been highly critical of the planting proposals prepared by the landscape consultants employed by Sir Owen Williams and Partners. Mr Long's first landscape report included species of tree and shrub which the Landscape Advisory Committee deemed to be too fussy, ornamental, colourful and urban for a modern rural motorway.93 At a meeting of the Committee in July 1957, Sir Eric Savill questioned proposals to plant Forsythia and Pyracantha, while Sir David Bowes-Lyon and the whole committee 'agreed that flowering plants of a semi-garden character were misplaced in real countryside'. Sir Ralph Clarke of the Royal Forestry Society for England and Wales voiced concerns over proposals to plant Austrian pines, as 'less ugly conifers [are] available', while copper beech, purple sycamore and whitebeam were thought unsuitable as 'the Committee did not favour colour variations in foliage other than shades of green'. 94 Mr Long revised the planting schedules, which were rejected again in January 1958. The Committee urged the consultants to simplify their proposals, avoid ornamental species of tree and shrub, focus on indigenous trees, pay attention to the speed and experiences of motorists and submit detailed illustrated planting plans rather than lists of species.95 Visits to the construction site in June 1958 and May 1959 confirmed the Committee's view that simple, large-scale massed plantings would be essential on such a vast and fast motorway. As Clough Williams- Ellis stated after the visit in May 1959: Traversing the actual carriageway one realized more vividly than ever the immense size ... It so far transcends the hitherto generally accepted human scale as actually also to dwarf nature itself... there is a danger that any landscaping effects may merely produce a niggling and irritating triviality.96

The consultants' modified and simplified planting plans were finally accepted by the Landscape Advisory Committee in October 1959, and 72050 trees and 4700 shrubs were planted in the winter of 1959-60. Twenty-five species of tree and ten of shrub were used, although 81 per cent of the trees were of just five common, long-established species: alder (10 000), ash (11000), common oak (20 000), Scots pine (10 000) and Spanish chestnut (7 600).97 The Landscape Advisory Committee felt it had succeeded in preventing Sir Owen's landscape consultants from urbanizing or suburbanizing the motorway with detailed ornamental species that would interrupt the flow of the landscape and distract drivers, but disagreements soon emerged over another issue: the design and landscaping of the first two service areas at Newport Pagnell and Watford Gap.

Sir Owen Williams and Partners were responsible for locating, landscaping and coordinating the design of the service areas, but separate architects were charged with designing the maintenance compounds, police posts and main buildings for the operators. The Royal Fine Art Commission and Landscape Advisory Committee complained about the lack of design coordination and the rather piecemeal fashion in which plans were being submitted for approval.98 The Landscape Advisory Committee were 'not very satisfied' with the layout proposed for Watford Gap service area,99 and the CPRE's representative, George Langley-Taylor, expressed concern at the 'lack of cohesion between the different aspects' of the sites, and the use of flat roofs on buildings.100 As he stated in a letter to the Ministry about the design of the Watford Gap police post: I find it difficult to comment because I fear that my objection to the long flat roof may be interpreted as an objection to modern architecture. Frankly I do not like it because I feel however right it might be as a modem building this long straight line is bound to be a jar on the landscape and I feel most strongly that in dealing with our motorways we should try to achieve a sympathy with the landscape and avoid introducing any 'shock' in our designs.'01 Sir David Bowes-Lyon agreed, stating that pitched roofs may 'help break up the straight lines of the buildings', while Clough Williams-Ellis also disliked the designs, adding that they 'were a fair sample of the modern trend in architecture'.102 The flat roofs remained in the plans, and architectural critics agreed that both service areas contained average modern buildings which would not enhance the English country- side. The Architects' journal referred to the 'commonplace design' of Watford Gap service area, which 'does not augur well for future motorways',103 while in the Architectural review Raymond Spurrier criticized Newport Pagnell services for its 'nondescript buildings and irresolute planning' which had the 'usual subtopian results'.104 The service area had brought subtopia to rural Buckinghamshire, and the Landscape Advisory Committee felt that Sir Owen Williams and Partners' planting proposals were unlikely to improve the situation.

At a meeting of the Landscape Advisory Committee in February 1958, Dr George Taylor expressed concern that Mr Long had 'injected "urbanization" into his proposals for service stations',105 and this was confirmed in July 1959 when a member of Sir Owen's staff wrote to the Ministry to outline their principle of treating the 'interior of Service Areas as partly urbanised'.106 In the earliest proposals for planting Watford Gap service area, Mr Long proposed that the parking areas be separated by green spaces that were 'informal and more of the nature of a park'.107 The exterior of the area would be planted with limes, while it was suggested that flowering shrubs should adorn the interior along with 'more unusual trees' such as tulip tree, maidenhair tree and wellingtonia.108 As Newport Pagnell service area was intended to serve lorry drivers, Mr Long prepared a planting scheme which would reflect the tastes and temperaments of the largely working-class, male commercial drivers. The central areas would be planted with laburnum or thorn, which would be 'in keeping with the necessity for attracting and pleasing the average lorry driver who would perhaps be more stimulated by a mixture of this nature than with the commoner ash/elm mixtures'.109 Stimulation and excitement were not the emotions the Landscape Advisory Committee wished to be associated with the landscapes of service areas. At a meeting in July 1960, Committee members expressed concern that ornamental trees and shrubs such as magnolia, liquidambar, rhododendron, viburnum and fuchsia Ricartonii might excite rather than relax drivers, and that the colours of detailed 'flowering shrubs ... may clash with that of the petrol pumps'.110 Sir Owen's landscape consultants had treated the service areas as semi-urbanized 'island sites', separated from the motorway and from the surrounding countryside,111 but the Landscape Advisory Committee emphasized that they must be treated as if they are part of the motorway, with large-scale indigenous trees to break up the lines of the modern buildings.112 While motorway service areas are traversed at very low speeds compared with the motorway proper, visual detail and clutter would still detract from their function as spaces of relaxation, revitalization, and flow.

Sir Owen Williams and Partners did not repeat their bridge designs on the northerly stretches of the Ml between Crick and Doncaster, and landscape architects and aesthetic commentators provided more favourable responses to later sections of motorway. In the Architectural review in 1975, Ian Nairn outlined the changes which had occurred to the landscape between Southampton and Carlisle in the 20 years since he had written Outrage. Motorways had been the 'only drastic change' to affect the route he had surveyed in 1955, and while creating a less visually aware, automatized 'motorway person', they were largely free from the subtopian clutter that adorned suburban roads: the motorway design and landscaping -after we got over the Ml -is one of the few genuinely collective and genuinely hopeful parts of design in Britain. In vacuo, of course. And the motorway verges, sealed off from us pygmies, become nature reserves. Oh children.113

The poor landscaping and architecture on the Ml may have halted the flow of the surrounding landscape, but plant seeds evidently did flow through the landscapes of the motorway. While 35 species of tree and shrub were planted on the original sections of the motorway in 1959-60, DrJ. Michael Way's botanical survey of the 184 miles of Ml between London and Leeds for the Nature Conservancy in 1970 recorded 384 species of vegetation.114 As the Landscape Advisory Committee recognized, motorway landscapes would and did change over time, as did attitudes to the value of both the landscapes and architecture of the motorway. During the 1970s, scientists such as Dr Way paid increasing attention to the ecological value of motorway verges,115 while in 1992 Andrew Saint suggested that Sir Owen's Ml bridges formed 'an important part of our heritage', and might be a target for preservation under English Heritage's postwar listing programme.116 While more critical attitudes to road building, driving and the environment were emerging during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, some felt that the landscapes of the Ml had aged and improved.

Conclusions

The great majority of people see the country mostly from roads, railways and footpaths. These points of view are those of the population in general, and should be regarded as being of national concern.117

During the Second World War and early postwar years, prominent figures in the Institute of Landscape Architects attempted to cultivate a role for members of their profession in reconstructing and shaping Britain's landscapes. It was argued that landscape architects, along with engineers, planners and architects, must account for the diverse ways in which people encounter Britain's landscapes, and Brenda Colvin, for one, was quite clear that the majority of the population experienced the nation's landscapes when in movement. Colvin, Crowe and Jellicoe positioned the mobile gaze of the driver at the core of their writings on the landscaping of Britain's roads and motorways; but while one could position their interventions in a diverse and extended history of artistic explorations into the embodied movements and gaze of travellers, it is important to recognize the quite distinct reasons why landscape architects attempted to account for the movements and speed of motorists. Painters, photographers and writers have often attempted to represent, capture or expose the dynamism of the driver's view of the landscape through the use of striking aesthetic techniques, but landscape architects stressed that it was the task of engineers and landscape designers to understand the driver's mobile gaze in order to design roads which were not striking and would not distract drivers attention from the events unfolding on the road. Roadside planting and landscaping must reflect functional, modern principles -of simplicity, unobtrusiveness and a sense of visual flow -and the landscape architect must adopt techniques for maintaining the orderly movements of drivers: planting to improve safety, guide the attention of motorists, screen unsightly views, prevent boredom, reduce dazzle and enliven the scene.

The first sections of the Ml motorway were criticized for failing to adopt a contemporary, modernist design aesthetic that was appropriate to a high-speed motorway. The solid, seemingly 'heavy' bridges and angular landforms were seen to interrupt the flow of the landscape both along and across the road, and Colvin, Crowe and Jellicoe all suggested that British engineers could have drawn important lessons from the design and landscaping of motorways in Germany and the USA. British landscape architects and preservationists had been admiring German and American motor roads since the early 1930s.'18 Colvin had toured the Westchester Parkway on a visit to the USA in 1932, and Crowe visited the Connecticut Turnpike, Merritt Parkway and the roads of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1950s.119 It was suggested that the modernism of Britain's new motorways could have benefited from an appreciation of the modern designs adopted in these and other countries, but Colvin, Crowe and Jellicoe also argued that the distinctiveness and diversity of the British landscape would necessitate the formulation of a British modernism on its motorways, with the incorporation and sensitive reworking of modernist aesthetic principles in particular regional and local settings. Crowe and Jellicoe stressed that this would require landscape architects to develop an appreciation of earlier English landscape and artistic traditions which had acquired an understanding of the mobile perspective of the traveller. Different ways of moving, at different speeds, would engender different ways of seeing and being in the landscape; but while established modes of travel might indicate effective landscaping and compositional techniques, the landscape architect must establish a modern road style appropriate for high-speed motorway driving.

Landscape architects attempted to shape and govern the experiences of motorists, but their landscape designs were merely one set of formulations that were intended to shape and influence the embodied experiences of drivers.120 Guidebooks such as Margaret Baker's Discovering Ml, 'written for passengers -perhaps bored by the apparent monotony of a road devoid of strip development and place-name signs' and 'arranged for easy assimilation at 60mph', were also intended to inculcate new ways of seeing and being in the landscape.121 The Highway Code, driving manuals, automotive accessories, the Institute of Advanced Motorists' training courses and newly designed motorway signs were also formulated with the intention of shaping the visual perception, as well as enhancing the performance, capacities and dispositions, of motorway vehicle drivers.

The writings of landscape architects such as Colvin, Crowe and Jellicoe -along with the work of artists, engineers, film-makers and writers who have operated with the concept of landscape -can alert us to the rich history of sensibilities to movement in and through the landscape. While these engagements may lack some of the theoretical cogency or complexity of academic attempts to develop more performative, practiceoriented or non-representational accounts of pre-cognitive action and movements in the landscape, they reveal how practitioners and artists have attempted to negotiate a, similar terrain to theorists of practice, by accounting for the dynamism and embodied engagements of people moving through the landscape. These artists and practitioners may frequently try to frame, fix or represent these dynamic movements through the landscape; but we can see their aesthetic engagements and closures as reflecting their excitement and emotion of being caught up in the midst of things, in the flow of life, in the production and ordering of landscapes.122

FIGURE 3

 3 FIGURE 3 Motorway embankments in England and Germany. Sketch by John Brookes in Sylvia Crowe's 7The landscape of roads. (Reproduced by permission of Emap Construct, The Architectural Press (an imprint of Elsevier) and John Brookes.)

references in the bibliography of Crowe's 7he landscape of roads. 46 Jellicoe, 'Motorways', pp. 275, 276. Crowe's discussion of links between English landscape traditions and Chinese philosophies of landscape and nature may well have emerged from her reading of Jellicoe's paper.

Sir Owen Williams, paraphrased account of speech in: 'Minister visits the motorway', Team spirit: the monthly news sheet issued by John Laing and Son Limited 141 (July 1958), p. 5. Although Sir (Evan) Owen Williams and his son and partner, Owen Tudor Williams, wrote a number of papers and articles on the design of the Ml, these tended to focus on the civil engineering dimensions of the scheme. Sir Owen did not engage in any published discussions on the aesthetics of the bridges, although other engineers defended the use of the solid

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Matless and Charles Watkins for their advice and guidance during the completion of the doctoral thesis from which this paper has been written. Phil Crang provided invaluable editorial guidance, and Tim Cresswell and three anonymous referees provided constructive feedback. Seminar audiences at the Centre for Rural History, the University of Reading, and the Countryside and Community Research Unit, the University of Gloucestershire, provided useful comments.

Notes 1 R. Banham, 'New way north', New society 20 (1972), p. 243. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. There is also, of course, an important difference between the viewpoints and embodied engagements of drivers and passengers, and of passengers in the front and the rear. 4 Recent texts which have sparked debates include: W. Schivelbusch, The railway journey: trains and travel in the 19th century (Oxford, Blackwell, 1980