London 1981

Peter MARSHALL


Westway, Paddington, 1981
27f-11: Westminster

You can click on the image to go to the next picture

The building at right is still there on Harrow Road next to the Westway immediately west of the Paddington Branch of the Grand Union Canal. The view from a slip road was surprisingly unchanged when last I was there. The building is I think now part occupied by Virgin. Grade II* listed in 1994, it was built for British Rail along with the adjoining Rotunda which housed their road vehicle maintenance section, and is usually known as the Battleship Building.
 
I find it hard to look at this picture and not to think of the work of J G Ballard, and in particular his book 'Crash' published 8 years before I made this picture. Ballard lived just a couple of miles from me in Shepperton, and the Westway and the elevated section of the A4 as well as other local scenes often appear in his novels.
 
Around this time I was working on a loose project with the title 'Under the Car' which I never completed. I wrote a little about it as a part of a talk I gave in 2007 on the photography of the urban environment and some of the changing ideas in planning, and how the invention of the car had completely altered our cities. You can see some more pictures from it in a post on >Re:Photo, Under the Car