Eleven years ago I wrote an article to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Westway, the elevated A40(M) motorway that snakes in and out of west London. I tried to suggest that beyond its brutal design, beyond the way it sliced through old London with the finesse of a blunt butcher's knife, the Westway was a fascinating road, a thing of strange if questionable beauty.
Readers weren't having it. Aside from two informative letters from engineers involved in the project, the response was perhaps rightly vituperative, and, at the time, not a little shaming. My problem, like many other people I know, is that I like fast cars and public transport, civilised city centres and the thrill of driving on dramatic roads into big, sodium and neon-lit cities by night.
Since then, this controversy seems to have melted into the lead-free air. Or at least it has if you go down to the Architecture Foundation, a gallery in deepest, traffic-laced London St James's. Their exhibition, It's a Gas On the Road, is an unashamed celebration of "petrol pumps, flyovers and architecture for the car". Originally a Hayward Gallery roadshow, On the Road has been extended by Helen Jones's It's a Gas, a homage to the petrol station.
To most people the banal roadside pitstop is a necessary and useful nothingness, a blind spot in the day, something to do with packets of Handy-Andies, M&Ms and bored staff in red jumpers: to design historian Jones they are as intriguing as out-of-the-way votive shrines are to the church-crawler with a pocket full of Pevsner.
It's a small show on a giant subject, and it doesn't come much bigger than the Westway or the Humber Bridge, built by Freeman, Fox and Partners in 1981. What it says, to me at least, is that the shock of Spaghetti Junction (Sir Owen Williams and Partners, 1972) has long since vanished. An A-road of contemporary writers, photographers and historians sing the body concrete. One young critic suggests that, for an Italian baroque architect of the 17th century, the Westway would have curves "to die for".
The point, though, is clear: in little more than a decade, the arterial road and its panoply of car parks and service stations, bridges and tunnels, has been elevated from the status of a pariah to the pantheon of architectural wonders. The Westway and Spaghetti Junction are up there, if you swallow the Architecture Foundation's line, with Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini's Piazza Navona.
It makes sense, in an age when the car is no longer king, that we should look at roads and roadside architecture in a new light. To protest against insensitively planned new roads in our crowded islands makes obvious sense, yet we cannot ignore the fact that even motorway protesters beetle down to campsites in battered VW campers - along the roads that flourished in the wake of the Beeching report of 1963 that signed the death sentence for an integrated British railway network.
For nearly 40 years, from the era of the Morris 1100 and Cortina Mk1, we have been a nation not so much in thrall with roads and their attendant architecture, as dependent on them. The Forth Road Bridge, one of the first engineering wonders of the road-dependent age, opened a year after Beeching. The railway age was now to be challenged by the structural might of the motorway epoch.
Who can fail to be impressed by the nature-defying Humber Bridge, and who can fail to be fascinated, as well as frustrated, by the M6's Spaghetti Junction? At a time when Britain's sordidly privatised railways have been relegated to those of Cuba on a bad day, we can't help feeling we need our cars more than ever before; and, as we do, perhaps we can't help paying more attention to the roadside architecture that serves them. One of Jones's discoveries when compiling It's a Gas is James Trew, busy at work on a chain of sculptures based on petrol station canopies, but located in natural settings in France rather than on the roadside. Trew sees the petrol station canopy as the "epitome of artificiality".
So critics, artists and historians are queuing up, like Friday afternoon traffic on the A40, to give praise to this relatively new, if curiously overlooked, architecture: all this before one gets to grips with Edward Platt's fascinating book Leadville: A Biography of the A40.
We can see, too, how some of the best contemporary architects have been taking roadside architecture increasingly seriously. The Architecture Foundation exhibition shows a model of Foster and Partners 1998 design for a Repsol petrol station chain in Spain. A couple of months back Ivan Margolius published his handsome book Automobiles by Architects (Wiley-Academy, 2000). Inside is Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's 1928-36 design for a "voiture minimum"; but, more importantly, there's Le Corbusier, one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, posing in front of his Voisin 10CV, which was used as a modernist prop in several famous photographs of his early white villas of the late 1920s.
From then on, streamlined (and otherwise all but featureless) modern buildings were best seen through the windscreen of Le Corbusier's Voisin, Frank Lloyd Wright's Cord 810 drophead, the Adler Standard 6 designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1931.
In the early 60s, Alison Smithson, the English architect who co-designed the Economist building where the Architecture Foundation has its gallery, wrote AS in DS, an intriguing, if largely forgotten, book about the relationship between architecture, landscape and the road as seen through the windcreen of her Citroen DS. The book was shaped on the floorplan of the sensational French car that, on its launch in 1955, Roland Barthes compared to a gothic cathedral. Here, said the philosopher, was "the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and held together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape". And who but a confusion of modern French philosophers could argue with that?
The fact, however, that so many diverse talents have turned their attention to the architecture of the road, from the heroic poetry of bridges to the doggerel of petrol stations, should encourage us to hope that a future generation of architects will see roads not as high-speed rats' alleys between their wonderful buildings, but as the glue that, for better or worse, sticks our towns and their architecture together.
It's a Gas On the Road is at the Architecture Foundation, London SW1 (020 7839 9389) until September 3. Leadville: A Biography of the A40 is published by Picador, price £9.99.
