The Way Towards the West has Gone West.

Welcome to Westway. It takes the driver West but only out of London. From Westfields Shopping Mall the driver drives East. The whole area is a blighted one. One passes through this zone of transience which defines the nature of the horrid area of Shepherd's Bush and the home of the BBC Television Centre.

Then again when alighting from the Shepherd's Bush Tube Station, it must be remembered that IKEA, the kind of store where riots break out as frantic consumers battle to get in first to grab the best bargains during their sales, has an advert on the Oyster Card reading "Travel is a means to an end. Home".


The most prescient of British novelists J G Ballard was correct to see Crash a dystopian version of the future in the 1970s when he used Westway, the inner city motorway which zooms into central London from Hammersmith to Paddington as an example of the 'Death of Affect'.
By this Ballard meant the deconstruction of cities and the settled life they once contained as leading to pathological reactions amongst a deracinated citizenry in which the car would become seen as a liberating means people use to overcome their sense of being detached from the city.

In Concrete Island ( 1974 ), the driver's crash off Westway into a Traffic Island he cannot escape from and who is ignored by the cars zooming their way towards Central London was a satire based on the retelling of the myth of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe was a man on an Island, a metaphor Daniel Defoe used to describe as Merlin Coverley puts it in Psychogeography,

' ( that ) with its twin leitmotifs of the imaginary voyage and isolation, provides a broad outline of a character who encapsulates the freedom and detachment of the wanderer, the resourcefulness of the adventurer and amorality of the survivor'.

Merlin Coverley emphasises the Robinson, a man cast adrift in an oceanic and unknowable place with all the fear that entails comes back into Ballard thus,

"Ballard describes modern life in advanced industrialised societies as characterised by a lack of emotional sensitivity. Amidst the barrage of media imagery to which we are subjected, our emotional response is blunted and we become unable to engage directly with our surroundings.

When walking along Westway from Westfields in Shepherd's Bush, a meaningless and weird zone of alienation and spiritual poverty, the reaction of the White Van men, known to drive manically through London, was one of total hostility to my decision to walk there. Pedestrians are subversive in a city dictated to by the demands of the automobile.

With St George's Flags fluttering, White Van Men screamed abuse, though the little pathway alongside it is just wide enough to allow one to pass without getting in the way. One driver screamed 'nutter' and another 'wanker'. A curious form of Road Rage. Aggressive banality was omnipresent in this zone.

Naturally, a lot of this aggression is a reaction to the sheer boredom and banality of London's descent into a large conduit for Capital, hot money and cars coursing through its veins and arteries, a City State that has become a law unto itself detached from England as a territorial nation.

Asserting one's" identity", the desire to feel radical and transgressive is not just connected with cocky attitudes and the empowerment of having an SUV, those "Gated Communities on wheels" but also in pseudo-libertarian proponents of the Great Car Economy such as the BBC's populist presenter on Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, who advocated knocking down cyclists.

The fact that this mutton headed dolt has books are best sellers shows the need to tap into the aggressive and liberating aspects of the car from the world surrounding atomised individuals. It appeals to those for who the banalisation of everyday life requires aggression as a marketing tool. Including stunts like ramming an SUV into a tree to show "toughness".

Indeed outside Westfields, there were utterly moronic adverts with an underlying mood of implicit aggression. Gym Box, soon to open at Westfields, seemed to advertise aggression as the only way of maintaining one's freedom. As only losers could think that being on the straight and narrow was the way forward.

Yet even weirder was the advert that shows the "drivenness" of contemporary Britain in 2010 where the same Gym Box, informs Westfields consumers that they have a human right given them by God to be absolutely beautiful, something again which gives credence to Ballard's notion in Kingdom Come about a similar Mall where it is seen as a religious experience.


Bibliography

Merlin Coverly. Psychogeography.
J G Ballard, Concrete Island.
J G Ballard, Kingdom Come