Fabrice Millet

Spaghetti Junction

This iconic motorway exchange in Birmingham, UK is a defining feature of the city. The Gravelly Hill Interchange, to give it its official name, dominates large parts of the North of the city and represents, in all its glory, the Modernist ideal of cars before people. There is a strange dichotomy between the optimism of the roads, standing tall on pillars, dominating whole neighbourhoods: a monument to post-war optimism that talks of the possibility for our parents and grandparents to travel freely, visit new places, trade faster, enter the modern world with a smile on their faces while they load their cars with products bought in gigantic shopping centres, and the world below the pillars, the dark underpasses, the dirty canals, the interlope inhabitants, the rubbish, the working belly of the beast, ready to swallow its children. The darkness at its heart that was always there.