Revealing Roads: The Spectral Sounds of Motorways

Roads hold multiple forms of meaning and contention beyond their ‘unreadable surfaces’, and underneath their designated purpose for rapid passage. This chapter addresses questions about how motorways might be sensed and heard differently. The enquiry attends to perspectives from movement conducted against the motorway’s grain. Based on moving with selected walkers who conduct ‘deliberately slow travelling’, and tracing the narratives of time-based civic art projects, the chapter explores the spectral dimensions of motorways in the UK. The chapter ends by positioning their streams of traffic as much as ghostly convoys to be looked back on as mundane landscapes of the everyday, in the process highlighting their contingent and contested forms.