Set back from the waterfront in Southampton, in that swathe of otherwise featureless ground that is its immediate concrete hinterland, are thousands of freight containers. Laid out in low-slung rows —and looking like a dowdy sculpture park, a lugubrious offshoot of Legoland — they are stacked into arbitrary patterns: scuffed whites, livid yellows, sombre, almost military blues and, between them all, a ubiquitous utilitarian orange that, when the sun disappears behind a cloud, suddenly turns the colour of rust. Seeing these familiar building blocks of international trade all gathered together in one place makes you speculate on how far some of them have travelled to get here. Recently arrived from New Jersey or Shanghai, or from the nearby ports of Rotterdam or Bremerhaven, the cargo they have carried now waits to complete the final leg of its journey, these days increasingly by lorry, to stores and warehouses across the UK. These thoughts enter your consciousness vaguely, absent-mindedly, as the smell of coffee from your styrofoam cup escapes into the damp, salt air. In the distance, a giant gantry crane hovers over its cargo like a massive mechanical spider. It is time to be leaving. You look at your watch, and clamber aboard. 250 miles to go.

English Journey, JB Priestley’s classic state-of-the-nation tour through the darkening landscape of England in the 1930s, also begins, with an equally noteworthy absence of ceremony, in Southampton. One step up from sticking a pin into a map, Priestley selects Southampton as a place ‘where a man might well land’, spends an hour or two wandering morosely around its portside streets and, after aiming a few barbed comments at places which have infrastructure and amenities but are not ‘real towns’, boards the first bus out. Priestley is off to look for England, that obscure object of fascination that has exercised, and tantalised, the literary imagination for generations. Capturing the quintessential qualities of such a diverse country has traditionally proved a complex and elusive quest. Simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, these defining images of England can either seem stereotypically familiar or illusory and intangible. Casting himself in the role of the no-nonsense, plain-speaking Everyman, Priestley is the latest to set out in pursuit, adding his name to a long list of literary travelogues inaugurated by Daniel Defoe’s 18th century opus A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain and more recently embellished by JV Morton’s best-selling car tour, In Search of England, published, in 1927, only six years before.

Priestley’s self-styled ‘Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought during a Journey through England during the Autumn of The Year 1933’ is a powerful addition to the genre. Part reportage, part polemical tract, it ignited considerable controversy when it was first published the following year, mostly for its unflinching, unflattering descriptions of industrial blight and urban squalor, but also for its equally withering assessment of the mean, moribund condition of many of the country’s villages and market towns. It is a curious book: a Romantic cri de coeur for an England that is irretrievably passing that at the same time retains an old-school Socialist faith in the onward march of technological progress. Although it rarely hits any great poetic heights, though, what stands out, across English Journey’s 300 or so pages, is Priestley’s absolute determination to confront the reality of the present, and record it in its actual, observable details, rather than live, nostalgically, among images of the past.

In a mirror image of Priestley, on the other side of the Second World War, the young architecture writer (and later broadcaster) Ian Nairn sets out on another journey that also begins in Southampton — heading North by North-West, along the edge of the Home Counties, through the Midlands, and on past Manchester, eventually driving as far as Carlisle. Much of his route follows the actual course of the A34, a deceptively long, and formerly unbroken, road that connected the two busy trading ports of Southampton and Manchester. When traced on a map, the route of Nairn’s journey up through the centre of England looks a little like the raised outline of a spine, albeit one slightly curved and stooped as if under the weight of a heavy load. For Nairn, the road acts as a kind of cross-section, along which he can examine the changing architectural make-up of post-war England. The A34 is especially useful in this in that it mostly sidesteps the big conurbations, with their daunting and often unrepresentative urban expanses, and, like a Betjemanesque version of Route 66, threads its way through an archetypal English heartland.

Like Priestley, he is appalled by much of what he sees. Writing in the special June 1955 edition of the Architectural Review, Nairn complains of a creeping proliferation of identikit estates and similarly faceless generic developments that threatens to turn large parts of the country into an anonymous suburban sprawl. Travelling the 400 miles from South to North, he bemoans how sections of towns at either end of England have now become virtually indistinguishable from one another. In a particularly vivid passage, Nairn anticipates ‘an England reduced to universal Subtopia, a mean and middle state, neither town or country, an even spread of abandoned aerodromes and fake rusticity, wire fences, traffic roundabouts, gratuitous notice-boards, car parks and Things in Fields. It is a morbid condition which spreads both ways from suburbia, out into the country and back into the devitalised hearts of towns… Subtopia is the world of universal low-density mess.’

It is a familiar lament, increasingly voiced by both Conservative and conservationist lobbies, worried at the erosion of the Green Belt and the slow and insidious destruction of England’s traditionally green and pleasant land. Fifty years on, many of Nairn’s predictions have indeed come true, and, to some extent, they were only to be expected, in the face of the growth of another England, a busy, thriving mercantile England, simultaneously belittled and praised by Priestley, which, following the logic of the contemporary post-industrial zeitgeist, has spread out from its former urban centres to establish itself along and around the road networks, which in turn, have mushroomed in size and scope to service its seemingly unstoppable progress.

Andrew Cross is too well versed in the ins-and-outs of English social history not to be aware of Priestley (and, probably, Nairn) and too well travelled on the highways and byways of England not to know about the A34. Indeed, Cross’s work over the last few years, as artist and curator, has gone out of its way to throw a new and often redeeming spotlight on some of the more disparaged or disregarded corners of England, on those so-called blots on the landscape that we see every day but usually tend to ignore. Although the works that have brought him most recent acclaim, photo-sets like Along Some American Highways and Some Trains in America, are — paradoxically — located in the USA, they are rooted in a sensibility that has been formed much closer to home, rehearsed in earlier photographic studies of suburban everytowns like Enfield and Swindon, and in hours spent patrolling the trading estates, technology parks and service centres that, in a disconcertingly short period, have become some of the invisible mainstays of modern architectural life.

The centrepiece of Cross’s touring exhibition ‘An English Journey’ 3 hours from here is a 110-minute road film shot, mostly, from the cab of a long-distance lorry en route from Southampton Container Terminal to Trafford Park Business Park on the outskirts of Manchester. It is a contemporary English journey that is repeated day after day, and echoed in the many thousands of other long- and short-haul runs that connect up a 21st century infrastructure of freight depots, distribution warehouses, factory units and out-of-town superstores. Like anyone wanting to get between Southampton and Manchester in the shortest possible time, Cross foregoes the scenic route of the A34 and travels, whenever he can, by motorway. It is a calculation that every driver makes all the time, and more often than not it is speed that wins out. Travel is increasingly measured in terms of this equation; in which a landscape we might feasibly want to stop in is exchanged for a landscape we simply drive through; one that, when we stop to recall it, leaves little or no lasting impression; that passes as if in a blur.

The road stretches into the distance under a perfect sky the colour of a computer simulation. Faster-moving traffic overtakes you on one side, while slowly changing snapshots of the English countryside pass by out the passenger window. Despite the ever-expanding programme of road building, and what one guesses to be a concomitant rise in levels of carbon monoxide, everywhere around you looks surprisingly green. On verges and embankments, landscaped plantings have burst from their clear-plastic chrysalises and become fully-formed trees. Hawthorn and blackthorn are in bloom. Fields and hedgerows rise into gently contoured hills. At intervals, place names flash up on road signs — places resonant with atmosphere and history, steeped in the shadows of an English past; places you remind yourself you said you were going to stop at, as you find yourself turning, once again, into the slip-road to the service station car park. There is never enough time. 90 miles to go.

The quickest route between two fixed points is no longer a straight line but, more and more, begins to resemble a curve: the arc that whizzes you around the houses, on roundabouts and by-passes; the detour that gets you there faster, no matter how irrational and counterintuitive it seems. Even if you wanted to travel from Southampton to Manchester along the route of the A34, you couldn’t. For sections of the journey, new roads — dual carriageways and motorways— supersede and circumvent it. On these stretches, the old road has been renamed, rebranded; disappearing from the map like one of London’s underground rivers. The M6, the heavy-duty successor to the A34, is, in turn, to be supplanted by a new road called the M6 Toll. We no longer travel as the crow flies, but always around, along the outside. And, in the process, place becomes displaced… no longer a site but, increasingly, more of a space — an atmosphere, an impression, an experience, something we carry with us as we go.

DIRFT is such an ugly name. It is, of course, an acronym, and stands for Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal. It is also a misnomer, since it is actually much nearer Rugby than Daventry and most of the freight that travels to and from it, these days at least, is by road rather than rail. Whatever you call it, DIRFT Logistics Park, to give it its full title, is the largest distribution centre in the UK. The hub of all hubs, it occupies a 365-acre site, dotted with low-level warehouses — containers for containers — that have quickly become the main distribution points for Britain’s biggest haulage contractors and supermarket chains. DIRFT may not be a great joy to look at, but, then, it probably doesn’t need to be. Its primary selling-point is location, location, location – most places in England are no more than three hours from here. Following the logic of just-in-time delivery, goods can be easily circulated around the country at short notice and in optimum quantities. At DIRFT, every journey can be precisely plotted, every load individually itemised, every pallet accounted for. DIRFT is the antithesis of drift, the desire to journey for no reason, to find what you find and see what you see. It is the exigencies of time and the imperatives of money configured across the cells of a spreadsheet and then given material, architectural form.

Although Cross’s journey will continue on to Manchester, DIRFT is very much the pivot around which the project turns. The epicentre of a new kind of radial, distributed, network, all roads, in some way, lead to and from here. At the heart of the film, the lorry loops around this section of the Midlands, past Coventry and Daventry, and then along the new M6 Toll, circling in a kind of holding pattern, as if unable to break clear of DIRFT’s gravitational pull. When it does, eventually, settle back into its straight northbound route up the old M6, Cross’s irregular mile-counter now showing distances away from DIRFT, there is something of a perceptual shift. After DIRFT, its JG Ballard-like glimmer of the future still fresh in your imagination, the landscape seems older somehow. Close up, the fields and hedges at the side of the road may seem more or less the same, but, in the distance, as we pass through the Potteries and into Lancashire and finally over the Manchester Ship Canal, power stations and factories begin to be seen. As we travel away from DIRFT, it sometimes appears as if we are also travelling back in time.

In his conclusion to English Journey, JB Priestley talks of his encounters with three different versions of England, which co-exist but only very occasionally interconnect. There is an old, almost timeless England; mostly rural, often bucolic, and generally undisturbed, or untouched, by change. Then, there is a 19th century England, of unprecedented urban and industrial expansion; one that still casts its shadow over the present. And, finally, there is a new-model England, only recently emerging and, at his time of writing, hard to precisely define. It is an England – ‘of arterial and bypass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings’ – that Priestley somewhat huffily describes as partly imported from America. Yet it is an England that he has some hopes for – an England of steady, incremental progress, ‘mass produced ’and ‘cut-price’ though, frequently, to his mind, a little monotonous, but one that he nonetheless endorses as having the potential to improve the lot of the average citizen.

Seventy years on, it is a manifestation of England that we see around us every day, however much the more familiar iconographies of countryside and city – mainstays of Priestley’s two other Englands – tend to dominate the scene. It is an England, even now, that comparatively few people think to mention, and still less to highlight or celebrate, but, in Andrew Cross, this England - of lorries and roundabouts, of storage depots and distribution centres, ‘of arterial and bypass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings’ – has found not exactly its champion as such but certainly an artist with both the determination and the talent to render it accurately and evocatively. More than that, 3 hours from here offers us a series of equally vivid insights into how quickly England is changing – its local character increasingly enveloped and transformed within a wider global environment. Consummately controlled and quietly, disarmingly compelling, Cross’s film takes us on a very English journey that tells us much about where we are now and where we might conceivably be heading.

Founded as long ago as 1896, Trafford Park was the world’s first purpose-built industrial estate.  A planned grid of workshops and warehouses, laid out on either side of the Manchester Ship Canal, it was both a storehouse for the massed goods of Empire and a potent, accumulating symbol of Britain’s industrial might. Part of the old docks has now made way for a modern container terminal (virtually identical to the one in Southampton), and former grain silos and processing plants have been replaced by their contemporary counterparts. As the lorry negotiates a series of roundabouts, the turn of this century blurs with the turn of the previous one; the redbrick core of the industrial estate slowly announcing itself like a grand Victorian railway terminus that, over time, has become almost entirely submerged behind its peripheral architectural clutter. Everything slows… and the lorry ambles to a stop, coming to rest under the vaulted roof of an old brick-built building, which, one day, you never quite know, may provide a perfect location for the Trafford Park Industrial Heritage Museum. We have reached the end of the line – of this repeated, and repetitive English journey, from Southampton to Rugby to Manchester; this backward and 4WD loop of time, whose end is somehow also its beginning. The film goes black – and, when it returns, we are left standing at the side of the road, the lorry we have been travelling in now passing us, followed in turn by three other lorries. There are still many miles to go.

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Steven Bode is Director of Film and Video Umbrella.