After many years of driving along the A40 Westway to get to jobs, photographer Andrew Meredith began exploring the troubled history of a road that divides west London in two
Andrew Meredith’s home went from Dudley to Ealing, London, via a detour in Falmouth to study photography. Various commissions meant regular trips into central London for shoots – along the Westway.
Over 20 years, he claims he’d ‘driven it so many times, I knew it like the back of my hand’. Until in 2021, in that way we all reflected on our givens post-lockdown, he realised he didn’t.
With its dramatic, fleeting views over the city, the Westway’s 4.6km raised section, completed in 1970, came at a cost. Carving west London in two, it was the subject of protest so divisive that similar plans elsewhere were axed.
Meredith read up on its troubled history of compulsory purchase and construction: shunted communities; an old lady’s battle for her garden; obdurate delays which begat a hoarded-up no-man’s land, which begat a gangland along the planned line of the road.
His shot across the Westway captures this historic fallout. Distant Westfield, towers vanishing into fog, while below are ‘junkyards, traveller camps, hidden homeless’. ‘All walks of life,’ he observes, either side of a road where walking is forbidden.