Paved With Good Intentions

I blame everything on Joni Mitchell.

You must remember the song? It’s late at night and she hears the screen door slam, then a big yellow taxi takes away her old man … Well, it’s a little known fact but it’s actually based on a real incident. Her “old man”, Ernie, had stropped off following yet another heated discussion about his choice of career. He’d left her a note. It read,

No Joni, No! I can’t take this irrational prejudice against pavements any longer. Either you come up with some positive paving imagery or we are through. Just look at cobbles from both sides for once!

Ernie.

It was very late. Public transport was not a priority in California back then and he had no choice but to call a cab. Sid E. Walk (Ernie to his friends) was the most famous path designer and pavement architect in North America at the time. He quite literally walked his talk. Joni, sadly, never did appreciate how fine a contribution to Western civilisation a nice stretch of Yorkshire stone flagging could be.

But it wasn’t just Canadian folk singers who weren’t so crazy about paving. A couple of years before Joni Mitchell opined “They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot”, the French Situationists famously declared, “sous les paves – la plage”. Now I don’t know too much about the geology of France but I’d guess that beneath the Parisian streets you’d find pretty much what lies under the streets of Leeds – filth, worms and the crushed and broken skeletons of many generations of vermin.

I know this for a fact. A couple of decades ago a friend was escorted to Weetwood police station where his van impounded as evidence. He was charged with crowbarring an entire LS6 pre-war terrace pavement and stripping its flag stones, worth an absolute fortune on the building reclamation black market. I quizzed him about what he’d found sous les paves.

“shit, worms and dead fucking rats” he said. “What the fuck were you expecting, a fucking beech! Dickhead.” I’d say that was pretty definitive.

Both Joni and her geologically deluded fellow travellers belong to a long tradition of strongly negative pavement propaganda. Just reflect for a moment. The road to hell – paved with good intentions. The Weimar Republic – paved the way to Hitler. And more recently (I just Googled “paved the way”) dozens of newspapers were reporting some twit in Egypt “paved the way” to Hosni Mubarak’s release … paving never leads to anywhere good. Paths always get bad press.

Well, almost always. There’s one exception. G K Chesterton (who was generally an exception) wrote a great poem called The Rolling English Road, but don’t let the title fool you. It’s actually about paths. Paths that are made by walking – in this case the paths are made by “rolling English drunkards” rambling with “ale-mugs in their hands”, which is probably how all the best paths are made.

Chesterton’s paths are reeling and rolling, merry and mazy, and most of all crooked – he’s not keen on the Romans or Bonaparte who wanted to “straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made”.

These days we aren’t much troubled by the tramp of invading centurions, and the Highways Department has more influence in correcting and constricting our wandering than Napoleon ever had. Whereas walking is naturally meandering and wayward and not always a logical or direct means of travel, cars demand the quickest way from A to B and prefer the straight line and the flat surface with the fewest distractions. Pavements want to be wonky and to follow the lines of desire rather than the flow of road traffic. There’s always a contradiction between where our legs want to take us and where the rational road will allow.

Contrary to Joni Mitchell, I think paradise will have some brilliant paving – though agree with her about the parking lots. I know there are people out there who think that Leeds is a veritable paradise – there’s even a lunatic fringe who go about saying it’s the “best city” – but I’ve just walked through the city centre and must say that the state of some of the pavements falls a fair bit short of the heavenly. Wouldn’t it be great if we could improve them just a little? Nothing grand or radical – I don’t expect beeches – but it would be grand just to be able to walk around a little easier, safer, and less stressed. Surely, we could do something?