A massive Escape Button surrounded by crowds of tourists. It would be nice if we all could really get away. Another planet, another dimension, somewhere where you’ll meet few if any humans.

My partner would always point out beauty spots of the countryside whenever we travelled on a motorway. Not so much now though. I heaped a debate on her, and she wasn’t really asking for one, but I did anyway. It went something like this…

What actually enabled us to see these beautiful places, from afar, from a car. The motorway (or freeway if you want me to go all American on you - besides that’s probably a misnomer by now anyway… I mean with the amount of toll roads these days I doubt few of them are actually free anymore.).

If you can see a beautiful place from somewhere as ugly as hell, you are spoiling the view. It’s kinda difficult to quantify what spoils a view. I have no problem with Wind Turbines for instance, I know a lot of nimbys do (nimby = not in my backyard). A blott on the landscape for me has more to do with function than form. It’s not how it looks so much as what it does, or rather how efficiently. All the Post Modernists back me up on this, form and function is a symbiosis of two essential disciplines. Anything that strips one from the other is a failure as far as design is concerned.

A wind turbine is essentially a beautifully ugly thing. It’s beauty comes from the knowledge that it does little if any damage to the environment in as efficient way as possible. From the belief that it is the way of the future, anon-polluting one at that. There are areas of the UK that won’t let you put up a satellite dish because it spoils the look of a listed village, a historical town, a heritage centre. I love history, but if it meant isolating myself from the present then I’d rather give it the heave-ho. Imagine what all those nimby council planners think about solar panels and wind turbines. Here’s a quickie, how about a wind turbine on every church steeple (how many are left now?) and disguise the top with a weather vane. It would be ugly, it would be inefficient, but if it gets past the beady eye of a planning officer with a heavy historical bias then it would be worth it.

Motorways are ugly. Cars can be beautiful in their own way, from a design perspective I mean. But get a thousand in a tailback with a cloud of smog overhead and you’re not painting a Turner are you? Until cars can hover we are stuffed. Let’s face it, we won’t have any countryside to tear through within fifty years. Even if we do learn to hover, we’ll still have difficulty seeing anything through that smog. How many years does it take to clean the sky anyway?

Getting back to the point, you can’t see beauty without ruining it, if man get’s his dirty mitts on anything beautiful, whatever his intentions, he does usually end up ruining it. I know we’ve got a few National Trust parks, they still get the smog but at least they’re not twelve lane bypasses for nearby cities. But what about the rest. It takes millions of years to form a landscape, man has always played with it, digging a tunnel here, building a bridge there. But now he can flatten it, raise it, put it out to sea, you name it. By the way - how long will those ornamental islands in Dubai last now that we know the world’s sea levels are rising?

Yes, yes, this has entry has turned in to one of those awful eco-rants you read just about everywhere. I’ll stop badgering you, I’m no better. Sure I recycle, I don’t even drive, but this old house we live in could never be described as ‘ecologically efficient’. I could do a lot more to help, but as the years have passed I’ve come to accept that what I remember is so drastically different from what the next can recall that soon a tree will be a surprise for the kids growing up these days.

I was on a plane recently, first time in years, I didn’t plant a tree, I didn’t carbon offset. But when I saw all those businessmen who use planes the way I used to use buses (get a bike), it kinda knocked me back for six. There is no great escape, no getaway. Next time you think you’ve managed to get away from the world, look up, that guy in the plane staring back, he’s thinking of putting a Starbucks franchise just where you’re standing.

The Great Escape