Filmstrips Photographs of the Sheffield ring road taken by the author in 2011
Downwards we hurried fast,
And entered with the road which we had missed
Into a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow travellers in this gloomy pass,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow step.
(Wordsworth 1805, p. 240)
Two hundred years after Wordsworth, we can continue to hurry fast at slow step, and to enter the road that we had missed, as we try to approach, circumnavigate, bypass or leave the city. I want to explore the extent of this continuity, broadening the ways in which the ring road might figure both as a site of actual experience and as one within thought. Although it is usually understood as the product of rationalised planning, the ring road can also be regarded as an instance and a site where rationality is exceeded. I approach it both as a site of sublime experience and as a figure for that experience, drawing on its ambivalent location between city and country, between artefact and nature. Its ability to be traversed in several directions simultaneously can cause theoretical as well as physical discomfort. In common with the sublime nature of Wordsworth’s time, it can elude our perceptual and imaginative grasp, while providing exhilarating transport. This sublime ‘failure’ can be observed anecdotally in real(?) experience on the road, but also in the movement of various attempts by disparate disciplines to pin it down with theory.
Modes of transport (‘1. Take or carry goods or people; 2. Overwhelm with strong emotion; 3. Cause someone to feel that they are in another place or time’, OED)
From its earliest record in fragments such as On the Sublime, a Greek treatise probably written in the first century AD,1 interest in the sublime has long been associated with its ability to transport us, rather than to persuade us rationally. Indeed, the modality of transport has proved to be a particularly enigmatic aspect of sublime experience. Peter de Bolla argues that, not only are the sources of movement many and various, but the transportation that these set in train involves discontinuous movement between states of mind and proves difficult to anticipate or contain: ‘The rhetorical force of “transport”’, he writes, ‘is not confined to the arts of oratory and persuasion; “transport” as a trope not only stands for the heightened sensation of the sublime, it also produces sublimity’.2
The consequences of this irrational and productive transportation have frequently been too frightening to accept, and discussion has been forcibly returned to ‘proper’ objects.3 The possible similarities between the transport available through the sublime and that experienced on the ring road can be approached through a consideration of their spatial and cultural dimensions. Both enjoy a certain slipperiness of spatial location and complexity of cultural claims; sublime transport in both cases can involve a tendency towards excessive production; and both have been subject to attempts by authority to cover over this excess. de Bolla suggests that much eighteenth-century aesthetics can be considered an attempt to bound or limit the power of this sublime trope. Theories of the sublime had to deal with ‘the problem of locating an authority or authenticating discourse . . . Such a discourse’, he states, ‘would need to control the transport resulting from the sublime experience, and to determine the limits of the transportation, from where and to where, with whom and by whom’.4
In his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant asserts that this experience could be delimited – or unified, to use his own terms – when each person, through the exercise of will, puts their own disposition to one side to ‘take a standpoint outside of himself in thought, in order to judge the propriety of his behaviour in the eyes of the onlooker’.5 This movement outside oneself to provide a viewpoint for judgement is a particularly important mode of transport. The tacit assumption is that propriety needs to be measured against previously established rules; the correct viewpoint for judgement is attained by assuming the viewpoint of the ‘creator’. Henri Lefebvre is critical of the ‘lucidity’ predicated on these assumptions, a situation he explicitly links to the planners and urbanists who ‘create’ the ring road:
The fact of viewing from afar, of contemplating what has been torn apart, of arranging ‘viewpoints’ and ‘perspectives’, can (in the most favourable cases) change the effects of a strategy into aesthetic objects . . . All of this corresponds only too well to that urbanism of maquettes and overall plans which is the perfect complement to the planning of sewers and public works: the creator’s gaze lights at will and to his heart’s content on ‘volumes’; but this is a fake lucidity.6
Although the arguments used to push through the construction of ring roads are usually made on highly rationalised grounds and according to the logic of a systematising thought, I would suggest that they also provide an instance where the experience of our designed environment opens up to a different reading. Just as eighteenth-century writers on the sublime failed to agree on whether the experience was universal, culturally particular or individual, so contemporary interest in the ring road produces a spread of irreconcilable approaches. Generally, ring roads are without clear definition (unlike motorways, whose requirements are clear in legal terms) and they are awkward to classify. The exemplars would be the orbital motorways, beltways, périphériques or via cintura that can be found around some of the world’s great cities, though many smaller towns are similarly ringed. Although the ring road is not a motorway (designed for high capacity and high speed), it does not provide for frontage access, pedestrians or stopping. This awkwardness about the ring road’s definition is shared by a variety of interested parties, from those involved in their planning through to those minded to analyse how they are used after construction, and again revolves around the issue of judgement.
In a discussion of how the engineer establishes criteria for judgement, for example, Gavin Macpherson observes how difficult a task it proves to be: ‘One of the problems faced by the highway engineer is that his creation will normally be required to perform a number of different, sometimes conflicting, functions’.7 A related difficulty of definition is raised by the UK Department of Transport’s criteria for highway link geometry, according to which the ring road would be classified as ‘rural’ rather than ‘urban’.