Woke up this morning thinking about Bill Drummond’s hugely enjoyable mid-life memoir ‘45‘ and the many crazed escapades it contains. In paricular his mate Gimpo’s decision in 1997 to drive nonstop around London’s M25 orbital motorway for 25 hours to find out where it leads. I wondered idly whether any of the video footage had made it onto the web.
It turns out that Gimpo’s insane pilgrimage to nowhere has become an annual event and he has an entire website devoted to the subject. It includes Bill Drummond’s entire chapter describing the inaugural M25 Spin and links to much video footage on YouTube. This is my favourite clip – it’s completely hypnotic if you can spare six minutes to chill with it – and concludes with a full moon swooping down over the toll barriers of the Queen Elizabeth Suspension Bridge.
Meanwhile, here’s Gimpo’s manifesto: Every year on a weekend in March on or close to the 23rd or 25th we drive around the M25 Motorway for 25 hours filming our journey… Over the years The Spin has revolved and evolved with friends and fellow travellers bringing their own unique magick to the event… Collaborators are welcome and encouraged to contribute creatively by using the on-board sound system to transmit a live soundtrack to the film… Each of the short films uploaded here are brief glimpses for your enjoyment but… If you want to know the things we see then step inside our spin!!!
Transport secretary, Philip Hammond today announced government plans to raise the speed limit to 80mph from 70mph. “Increasing the motorway speed limit to 80mph would generate economic benefits of hundreds of millions of pounds through shorter journey times. So we will consult later this year on raising the limit to get Britain moving” he said.
Predictably, his proposal’s been denounced on grounds of road safety, environmental damage and increased energy consumption. But let’s take a look at the potential benefits.
As a 61 year old commercial traveller I’ve probably done a bit more motorway driving than Philip Hammond and also have some experience of breaking the speed limit. So for me this is a bit of a specialist subject: how much time does increasing your top speed from 70 to 80 actually save on a 100 mile journey ?
Well, at risk of stating the bleeding obvious, every additional 10mph of speed brings diminishing returns. If it was possible to travel the whole 100 miles at top speed without ever slowing down, then:
At 30 mph it would take 200 minutes At 40 mph it would take 150 minutes At 50 mph it would take 120 minutes At 60 mph it would take 100 minutes At 70 mph it would take 86 minutes At 80 mph it would take 75 minutes
So even travelling flat-out, increasing speed from 70 to 80 only shaves 11 minutes off the journey time.
But as every boy racer knows, under normal traffic conditions you can only hit top speed in short bursts because of those pesky Other Drivers. How often have YOU been overtaken at speed by some terrifyingly reckless fuckwit – and I speak as a repented sinner – only to end up 10 yards behind him in stationary traffic a few miles down the road?
Even if it was possible to hit top speed for as much as 50% of your journey, the time saved by that extra 10mph would be just five and a half minutes. So much for those “economic benefits of hundreds of millions of pounds” – you’d probably need the whole five minutes to sit down with a cup of tea and recover from the stress.
Snapshots from the driver’s seat in stationary traffic at various points across London this afternoon, after dropping my wife at Liverpool Street station for a night away in Norfolk.
Click here to view the full slideshow on Flickr…
This immaculate late 1950s Morris Commercial J-type with its custom ice cream van body still regularly plies for trade outside the Royal Festival Hall at the South Bank Centre in London.
The GPO used a version of this van both for Royal Mail deliveries and for their engineers with Post Office Telephones. Yes, kids – there was once a time when Royal Mail, Parcel Force, Post Offices and British Telecom were all part of the same nationally owned company – which was run as a public service rather than as a way of extorting money from the public for the benefit of its shareholders.
According to Wikipedia the only difference between the Morris J Type van launched in 1949 and the equivalent Austin 101 born in 1957 was the badge above the radiator grille. This one says “Morris COMMERCIAL” – both models rolled off the same assembly line at the Nuffield factory in Oxford and were eventually discontinued in 1961 after nearly 50,000 had been made.
By comparison, Ford introduced the Transit van in 1953 and haven’t stopped making them to this day. As of last year they’d built six million of the things – I even briefly owned one myself. But that’s another story altogether.
If this doesn’t take you back, just for a moment, to postwar Britain then you probably didn’t live there. Writing this blog helps remind me of that vanished world we grew up in – while at the same time making me heartily glad to be in the here and now. I do miss the people – particularly close family like my dad, mum and grandma. But at the same time they impressed themselves so deeply on us all it also feels like they’re only just out of reach. Even though two of them died more than half a lifetime ago. Their diaries, the photographs, the objects and furniture we’ve inherited, their sayings and quirky family names for things are still very much with us.
