Event Details

Please join us for Richard Brook’s inaugural lecture followed by a wine reception on Wednesday 24th May, 17:00, Cavendish Lecture Theatre.

TITLE: Making a virtue of necessity: infrastructure, landscape and the M62 motorway

ABSTRACT: Motorways are rarely considered in relation to their design. In fact, it may be fair to say that motorways are rarely considered at all, except when becoming visible by virtue of their failure. The multi-lane tarmac carriageways, that provide the majority of distribution infrastructure in the UK, act almost exclusively as a space of transfer, of motion, fleetingly temporal and only afforded object status in cartographic representations. Their presence, as static elements, as parts of landscapes and as parts of extended urban fields, seems starkly obvious, but is little explored in academic literature. In this lecture I will reflect on the motorway and its landscape as a designed object in its own right, one that embodied a particular moment in the twentieth century when state powers, political networks and professional expertise combined in the coproduction of space for a common good.

This is a public event and everyone is very welcome to attend.