Two bridges cross the river, 300 metres and an aesthetic mile apart. A little downstream, 18th-century builders had carried the old Great North Road over the Ivel in the only way they knew, fashioning pretty arches from local stone and a humpbacked road wide enough for two carriages to pass.
Here, their 20th-century counterparts twinned it with something bigger. Committed to a four-lane, prosaically named A1, they used an all-prevailing material that could be relied on for strength, durability and ugliness.
Passersby above see a road, railings and catch a sideways glance over water. We who live here and walk through the riverside underpass beneath see in the concrete a patina of grossness, discolouration as it weathers, the stains and dribbles as chemicals leach and bubble out, and the inevitable graffiti splashed over the drab walls.
Yet even here, there are times when the sun pierces such blight with beauty. On one frosty morning, short drainage pipes suspended from the roof had become icicle nurseries, the frozen spears pearling at the tips and dripping in slow motion as a thaw began.
All summer long cattle in the river meadow had used the underpass as a cowshed, huddling for shelter from the elements between the columns. Long since taken off to market, the animals lived on in the pockmarks of hoofprints, a patterned floor mosaic of shaded hollows and bright rims.
Somehow, a single spider’s web had outlasted the comings and goings of the herd. A shaft of sunlight picked out the dusty thread, stretched from floor to ceiling like an anchoring guy rope. Sunbeams stole across to illuminate the whole underpass. Striped shadows of columns streaked over the floor, the graffiti glowed black, blue and petrol-purple as if it were a wall painting. I half imagined this underworld as a hallowed church or cathedral crypt.
There was a choir here too. It chattered ceaselessly as it ran over the joints between the concrete on the roof above. A hypnotic chant of traffic, it sang the same song over and over – “the-dum, the-dum, the-dum”.
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