Yo Dawg
December 2010
Dan’s boiler was bust, so he stayed in to wait for the landlord. I turned up, attacked it with a hammer and it worked again. We went out to play when Neb got here, choosing to walk half a mile into a road tunnel that tastes of death. We ended up dropping from one tunnel into another, finding a tunnel reminiscient of many of the cable runs in central London.
The tunnel was built to ventilate the road tunnel above, and is also now used for supplying water between the banks of the Thames, We walked to each end, and occassionally the vents came on, roaring with cold December air coming at us for 5 minutes before relenting.
The idea of a tunnel inside a tunnel is an odd one, but a logical one too. The road tunnel is narrow enough anyway, so to make the most of the width the road level has to be at a suitable height to allow passage of cars in both directions. This leaves a void.
Exercising access to this voidspace is not a right or a priviledge, it’s just something that can be done. Why sit and wallow in the regimentation of shallow, sterile spaces presented to us as ‘safe’ and appropriate for use? An urban hike through this oddity of an infrastructural space that tasted of disuse and dereliction was just the tonic over a Christmas period that had fed commercialism to us at every angle.
[…] and relocated, condemned and celebrated, backfilled and re-excavated. As Winch writes on his blog, exercising access to this voidspace is not a right or a privilege, it’s just something that can be…. And we do – again and again. These sunken tombs have a magnetic pull, despite, or maybe due […]
Enter the Necropolis: Subsurface Paris | Place Hacking
12 Nov 11 at 9:02 pm