A home on the motorway

In the very early 90s, when we first lived in the Lakes, my first wife and I would sometimes go to visit her parents in a the small town just outside Oxford where they lived. (Which seemed more sensible than attempting to visit them in a different town.)

We'd take the M6 down to Birmingham, cut west on the M42 and then head down the A40. It used to take quite a while and the last part of the journey could be quite frustrating if there was a lot of traffic.

And then they opened the M40 and suddenly we could whizz down that last leg of the journey. Of course, it also made a massive difference to all those towns on the A40, which suddenly - overnight - seemed to travel back in time to an age where cars were a relatively new invention and the roads were no longer clogged by articulated lorries, commuters and sales people.

The funny thing about the M40 is that it built through land where there was no housing: the major road simply ploughs through the countryside. That's not true of some of the motorways up here, where there are some houses right next to the motorway. Indeed, in one place, the M62 splits in two to go around a farm.

I wonder sometimes what it's like to live in these houses and I'd like to photograph them all but I'm normally passing at sixty or seventy miles an hour. Today, though, I was lucky enough to be stuck stationary in a traffic jam, so I was able to take a shot of this place.