Desire lines

 

We have most of our milk delivered to the doorstep in glass pint bottles, but at least once a week I top that up with milk bought at the petrol station on the intersection. The forecourt is designed for cars, with no provision made for pedestrians who come to the station to buy sweets, newspapers or tobacco products. And so, of course, pedestrians have made a desire line, albeit a very short one, that cuts between the public footpath and the petrol station forecourt at the rarely used automatic carwash on the corner of the site.

Desire lines, also known as desire paths, are those dirt tracks, worn away under foot, that cut across parks and vacant lots, or cut the corner off a bend in the official pathway. Footpaths and pavements are laid down by town planners on mapping boards, before being laid down in concrete flags or asphalt by workmen. Desire lines are public works of art, a dialogue between strangers that co-creates a more-liveable urban environment. Someone steps off the prescribed path and gives expression to another possibility. But the desire line depends on the person who comes next, the second and a third, who first notice the line that has been suggested, and then choose to take it themselves, rather than cut their own, rather than, collectively, to trample the ground so that in time the whole space is worn to earth. Desire lines say, ‘This is the Way: walk in it!’ and those whose own desire is awakened stop in the tracks, turn off the broad path that leads to some form of mass destruction (or, loss of some quality of life) and follow on the narrow path on which a fuller experience of being alive is to be found.

Today, I went to fetch some milk, and I discovered that someone has erected the most enormous communications mast on the public footpath ... right in front of the desire line.

As if to say, ‘This unofficial path is barred. You must connect with your neighbour in this virtual (and of course monetised) way. By order of the Pax Romana.’

This desire line must be one of the shortest that exists. And yet each time I step on it, I am aware that I am connected to my neighbours, even on trips to the petrol station forecourt when I do not meet anyone on the way. I am co-creating physical space. There is something almost magical about that scrappy corner of scrub, the almost abandoned carwash, blue light reflected on rain-slick tarmac when it rains at night. It puts a smile on my face that I take all the way to the cashier as I present my two quarts of milk to be scanned and paid for.

But it has never felt better than today, stepping behind the communication mast and disregarding its injunction.