The Pedestrian Underpasses of Cowcaddens

I can recall having a wonderful epiphany not in an underpass but near one where I lived as a boy, at the east entrance to Victoria Park in Whiteinch. It was a striking moment where, looking at a concrete beam that formed part of a slip-road and the inadvertent space it had formed beneath it, I understood not just the nature of impermanence but also the significance of being insignificant.

Naturally, underpasses or 'subways' are not insignificant, but they are hardly regarded with a poetic eye. And yet...

Every city has them. When I lived in Warsaw they even had them for animals, small tunnels and pipes that they could use to escape almost certain death by crossing busy roads or railway lines. I have always found them, like bridges, fascinating. Indeed, the underpass is itself a sort of inverted bridge. Perhaps it is the obvious 'connecting' quality that fascinates me, or simply the contrast of light and darkness, and the shady penumbras which cannot be classified as either. Perhaps it's just the quietness of these spaces, the 'off-worldness', while hordes of demented men outsource their own movement to machines above. Whatever the case, I am compelled to write about them, to photograph them and to smile each time I pass through them.

Underneath the M8 and A804, between Chinatown, Garnethill, & Braid Square, Woodside.

Location scouting for the ghost of Tarkovsky! [Underpass beneath Cowcaddens Road between Buchanan Bus Station & Caledonian University].