15

The Quiet Revolution

The First Turnpike at Caxton, Cambridgeshire

When I was young, my family would pay regular trips to Cambridge, to visit my uncle’s family. We lived in a small village in the gently undulating chalk hills near the small town of Baldock in north Hertfordshire. In the eighteenth century my Quaker ancestors built a brewery there and the Pryor family have lived in the area ever since. Our route would take us past the south Cambridgeshire village of Caxton, and on its outskirts a weathered gibbet with a vestige of rope still dangling forlornly from it. At which point my nine-year-old imagination would go into overdrive, conjuring up a lurid image of a highwayman’s body hanging from it, his distraught wife and family weeping on the ground below. Back then, I didn’t realize that the gibbet itself was a later restoration, but it didn’t matter. It achieved its aim: ever since, I have loathed the obscenity that is capital punishment.

The straight north–south road we drove along to Caxton was first laid out by the Romans, who named it Ermine Street; later, it became known as the Old North Road. Its present status as the lowly A1198 belies its historical importance in the development of England’s infrastructure.

Most accounts of the early industrial era start with the rise and development of those precursors to the railways, the canal networks. These often involved heavy civil engineering projects, such as tunnels and aqueducts. Such projects made the reputations of the great civil engineers: men like John Rennie and Thomas Telford. Roads, by contrast, rarely get mentioned. Nevertheless, they also played an important part in the development of modern industry and, most particularly, in the way it was managed and marketed. Canals were able to move bulk goods, for example grain, or coal, in large quantities and very cheaply, but they were slow. Mail needed to be moved quickly, as did papers, books and lighter products such as clothes, and food also needed to travel faster. Communication then and now was about meeting new people: new clients, new suppliers and new bankers – all of whom were essential to any expanding enterprise. These things required an efficient road system.

Up until the later 1600s, the maintenance of England’s road network was the responsibility of local authorities, even in poor rural areas where money was very short. Many roads were in disrepair, and some were abandoned, to become green lanes. Then in 1663 it was recognized that an important arterial route, the old Roman Ermine Street in the counties of Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire – then in a very poor condition, after decades of neglect – needed substantial repair. Materials to carry out the necessary roadworks had to be brought in, but none of the parishes through which the road ran had the money to pay for the work.1 So a Turnpike Trust was established, and, like the many others that followed, it had to be approved by Parliament.

The idea of forming Turnpike Trusts had begun in Hertfordshire in the 1650s, when parishes along the Great North Road (now the A1) petitioned Parliament for help in maintaining the heavily used road. Parliament established the Trusts to supervise the spending of public money and its repayment, through tolls. The first trusts were project-specific and looked after short stretches of pre-existing roads. After 1663, turnpikes became substantial, self-financing roads that frequently involved widening and straightening roads, and even the building of entirely new stretches. The term ‘turnpike’ refers to a turnstile or gate that road users could only pass through after they had paid a fee, which went towards the maintenance and improvement of the road along which they were travelling. Usually, such upkeep involved the clearance of obstacles, unnecessary diversions, and the provision of milestones and signposts. Soon toll-houses, as they were called, developed their own distinctive style of architecture: polygonal, many-windowed structures with clear views of the road in several directions. You can still spot hundreds of them on roadsides today. As the better-maintained roads proved more popular, especially in the eighteenth century, coaching inns sprang up. These inns, often featuring a large central arch leading through to a stable block at the rear, provided fresh horses and secure stabling and, for travellers, food and a bed. In many towns, these new inns became destinations in their own right and many offered rooms where people could set up business meetings. It proved a successful, cost-effective system for providing modern roads, which was soon adapted across the British Empire, and in the United States.

By and large turnpikes were self-financing, and they transformed England’s road system. And it all began on Ermine Street, which for me today is England’s most atmospheric road.2 It doesn’t pass through spectacular scenery, but runs through eastern England, from the Thames valley, skirting the Chiltern Hills and the western fringes of the Fens before crossing the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Wolds. As you follow its course, you will soon get to spot the familiar milestones, toll-houses and, of course, those numerous roadside inns. Hundreds, probably thousands, still survive along England’s roads and can easily be spotted. I like the scene in Caxton particularly: an ancient village in rolling hill country with woods and high hedges. Somehow it manages to retain its character, despite the burgeoning presence of Cambourne, a spin-off small new town satellite of Cambridge, a mile or two to the east.

When Cambourne was built, the A10 was diverted, thereby removing the queues of traffic that used to choke the centre of Caxton. The two roadside inns, the Crown and the George, near the brow of the hill, on the west side of Caxton, are particularly fine and when seen from the front appear to be eighteenth century. But go round to the back and you will find they are actually Elizabethan.³ This re-fronting of earlier inn buildings is a distinctive feature of towns and villages along Ermine Street, and many other turnpikes. It shows how successful the road improvements were in encouraging new traffic, and also illustrates the political and economic pressure to form the first Turnpike Trust. These added-on Georgian frontages are all about promoting the inns to the many travellers that journeyed along the upgraded road.

There is something so dull and ordinary about modern road labelling. Take the A1198, but now use its original Roman name, Ermine Street, and it starts to come alive. I would suggest you go to Caxton and then head south, towards Royston. The road here lives up to its Roman engineers’ dream: it runs dead straight, for miles and miles. As you pass through rural woodlands, the trees have been cleared back, just as they were in the late seventeenth century, giving a wide field of vision, discouraging lurking highwaymen. There are a few Georgian wayside inns, all set back the regulation distance from the road. It’s a lightly travelled route, and one would not be surprised to see a coach and horses approach from the other direction. If ever there was a path to the past, Ermine Street has to be the one.