The tunnel, the towpath and the window – under the M6 at Spaghetti Junction

Full Episode description

Set free from its cradled bowl, the smoke from the bargeman’s pipe rose straight, into the sky. Lighter than air, the burning vapours knew all-too-well where they wanted to go. Up! And so up they went. Unravelling coils of wisdom, racing towards one small window of blue in the vast ashen sky.

Not in your lifetime, nor mine, the bargeman confided between tokes from his short black pipe, but sure as night follows day all of this’ll be buried. His prophecy seemed to startle a bird out of a hedgerow, some fifty yards yonder along the towpath. It flapped low over the water before dropping into the scrub opposite. The barge horse, head deep in the thick grass beside the canal, only twitched an ear. 

Buried? I said, looking up and down the towpath, then up into the vastness of the sky. All of this? More mouthing the words than saying them. The bargeman made an arch with his work-worn hands. Black water, under a metalled sky.

The horse tore hungrily at the grass. The bird remained in its refuge. I watched as a curl of smoke lifted towards the patch of piercing blue. The bargeman saw me looking, then slowly let out a gentle smile. If you ask me I reckon they’ll have to keep that little window up there.

His words made me fix my eye on it. Why will they do that? I whispered. To let the future in, when it comes knocking, he said, pulling up the horse’s rope. That’s the blue of the world beyond. The one that’s tired of all our soot and smoke. Teach the children about the blue, for when it comes knocking. And Never Lock Your Door.

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Built in the 1840s, the Tame Valley Canal was covered by the M6 motorway in the 1950s, and then overshadowed by further development of Spaghetti Junction in 1972. When we visited on a bright May day, there were no boats or birds on the water. The cars, motorbikes and lorries, oblivious to the space underneath. Just a few walkers and cyclists joined us in the empty space below the concrete.

There, in a dark tunnel under the road, a window onto the sky, placed to let the light and sound from above in. Impossibly placed graffiti on the other side of the canal said in huge letters ‘Never Lock Your Door’.

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