Broadland Northway (2018)

On its completion in 2018, Norwich’s controversial Northern Distributor Road was euphemistically renamed Broadland Northway. I had documented the road’s construction in my Northern Distributor series (2016-18), noting its acknowledged harm to protected species and to the rural environment, and trying to give effective pictorial expression to my opposition and dismay. In that, I failed, as I now see the traces of a picturesque aesthetic and a lingering Romanticism in those images (see artwork archive). The more recent Broadland Northway images try to give blunter visual expression to my continuing political objection to the development, presenting the outcome as a kind of redacted landscape, struck though and struck out by the thick black line of the road.