The Road as Workplace

For most people the road is somewhere you pass through. For our subjects it is the premises.

The passenger seat of a working van: clipboard, gloves, handset. In most of these recordings the vehicle is not transport but premises.

A road is designed to be crossed and not occupied. Everything about it — the surface, the sightlines, the speed limits — assumes that everyone present is going somewhere. The people in this collection are not going somewhere. They are at work, and the road is the floor of the building.

This produces a set of problems that other workplaces solved a century ago. There is no obvious lavatory. There is nowhere to eat that is not the seat you have been sitting in for six hours. The place where you kneel to do your job may be a live lane. Almost every subject in the collection has a practised answer about breaks, and most of those answers involve a car park.

It also produces a kind of expertise that is real, hard-won and completely unportable. Knowing where a lorry can turn in a particular village. Knowing what a cross-wind does to a light van at a particular point on a particular coast road. None of it transfers anywhere.

In their words

It's not transport. It's the room. It's the room you're working in, and it happens to be moving, and there's a person in it who's frightened.
Dee Kavanagh · Emergency ambulance technician

The hard shoulder isn't a place. It's not a lay-by. It's a lane that happens to be empty at the minute.
Tam Boyce · Vehicle recovery operator

You feel the van go light — you feel it come up off the road, just slightly. You learn to sit different.
Sheila Kerr · Rural post driver

I know that road the way you know a house in the dark. I don't know anything else like that.
Henry Ozanne · Coach driver

The unportability is worth dwelling on. Several subjects have between twenty and thirty years of accumulated knowledge about one specific stretch of road, of a kind that could not be written down in any useful form and will not survive their retirement.

This is part of why the project exists, though we would be overstating it to claim that a recording preserves the knowledge itself. What a recording preserves is the fact that the knowledge existed and that somebody held it.

Records quoted here

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Themes change as the archive grows.

Every new recording is read against the existing themes, and the themes are rewritten when they stop describing what is actually in the collection.

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