The conventional view is that infrastructure installations (highways, railways, energy conduits, sewerage, etc) are purely utilitarian structures. We are led to assume that no thought went into creating a particular aesthetic character for them; if one was created, it was by accident, inherent in the nature of pragmatic materials and forms. Perhaps when they were first built, items of massive infrastructure (pylons, flyovers, etc.) may have seemed sublime to much of the general population. Pristine piers and slabs of concrete would have glowed in the sun – even in Britain. As it has aged, stained by water and discoloured by oxidation, the glow has turned to a glower. Any novelty in immense scale has long since worn off, presenting instead an air of menace – particularly given its proximity to the humbler-scale abodes of everyday urban life. This sense of menace is of course only partly a visual one – one that is accentuated by the intensity of local pollution (whether air, noise, light, or electromagnetism) generated by its use.

Yet despite this poor public image, I find tremendous aesthetic possibility in such places. The aesthetic character I find in the flyovers, for example, is one of bold, forceful geometry. In terms of resemblances, the interpenetrating road decks suggest a kind of geological coitus, or a choreographed writhing of some giant igneous reptile. Alternatively, their underbellies create dank, shadowy caverns, a quasi-subterranean world beneath the beast stalking above. The effect is an expression of the sublime, an awe inspired by the immensity, hardness of surface, velocity-laden lines, and dramatic shadow play, an underlying unease (if not terror) that this thing is unconcerned for the vulnerability of our fragile bodies.

I am not attempting to re-brand flyovers as aesthetic gems, claiming that we have failed to appreciate their true character. Nor am I suggesting that, as an urban feature, they are either entirely benign or even generally attractive in situ. Instead, I see myself as discovering (or perhaps merely depicting) an aspect of the urban motorway which is typically not seen by the vast number of people who live near or pass by. In this respect I regard my work as akin to the many enterprises which have sprung up under the Westway, a 6-lane flyover in west London. I presume that the flyover was designed solely to mitigate noise created by the road traffic and to allow cross-traffic (plus railways and a canal) to pass underneath. By contrast, the land use beneath this lunging (and occasionally soaring) behemoth has developed piecemeal, as an array of businesses have adapted to what is fashionably called ‘interstitial’ space, but could perhaps more accurately be thought of as ‘waste-space’ with no obvious use. These businesses include art and music studios, clothes shops and cafes, football pitches, skate parks, a sports centre with tennis courts and climbing walls, a riding school, scrap merchants, car mechanics, and an ambulance station. In some cases, they occupy the space in much the same way as railway arches have come to be utilised: self-enclosed, seamlessly abutting the underside of the road deck. In most, however, they crouch or duck beneath the slinging motorway. It is this spirit of adaptation to the wilds of urban landscape that I partake in when photographing.