Staffordshire – the Potteries viewed from Basford, 1850. Note the train in the middle distance, sounding the death knell of the coaching inn.
We are a motorway race rather than an island race.
Will Self
Towards the end of Withnail and I (1987), a drunk Withnail is filmed careering down the M6 from Cumbria on his way back to London.
The only problem is, it’s not the M6 from Cumbria, like it’s supposed to be. A rogue sign in the background reveals that filming was done on the M25, just before London’s orbital motorway was opened by Margaret Thatcher on 29 October 1986.
‘M25’ is emblazoned in huge white letters on the blue background of the motorway sign. But, still, it blends into the back of the shot, despite the mistake, because the style of that sign was the same as it would have been in 1969, when the film was set.
Motorways across the country are now practically uniform. You can forgive another motorist on the M25, Dennis Leighton, eighty-two, who, in December 2011, used the road to drive from Windsor to his daughter’s house, fifty-five miles away, in Swanley, Kent. Thirty hours later, he still hadn’t made it, having gone round and round the orbital system. Unless you happen to take in a local landmark or a change in the landscape, Berkshire, Kent and all stops in between end up looking fairly identical.1
The font of British motorway signs hasn’t changed since 1958, when a designer called Jock Kinneir road-tested the style on the first bit of motorway to be opened in the UK, the 8.5-mile Preston bypass section of the M6, officially unveiled by Harold Macmillan.
That sans serif font on road signs, created in a series of designs by Kinneir and Margaret Calvert from 1957 till 1967, has been extraordinarily successful and long-lasting. It also looms larger in the national consciousness because of the British ban on motorway advertising, unlike in America and much of the Continent. (There’s a similar contrast at Piccadilly Circus: only one side of the circus, owned by Land Securities Group, is plastered with advertising; the other sides, owned by the Crown Estate, ban advertising.)2
Kinneir thought the simple sans serif font on motorway signs was easier to read at high speed. He also mixed upper and lower case; signs in capitals only, Kinneir thought, smacked of authoritarian government.
In official terms, Kinneir’s font is a refinement of Akzidenz Grotesk; later given its own name, Transport. The idea was to be modern, but softer and friendlier than European road signs – perhaps the reason why opponents called Kinneir’s font common and fought for two years to change it.
As I write, there’s another font row going on. In August 2009, IKEA changed its font from IKEA – in the IKEA Sans font, their customized version of the 1927 Futura font, a German Constructivist style – to IKEA, in the Verdana font, a 1994 Microsoft innovation designed to look good on a computer screen.
Kinneir’s new font was combined with European signage conventions: triangular signs to warn motorists; circles for commands; and rectangles to give information. Different colour schemes were used for different roads: white lettering on a blue background for motorways; yellow road numbers and white lettering, on a green background, for primary roads; black letters on white for secondary routes.
Using pictograms on signs was another Continental idea adapted by Kinneir and Calvert. Calvert drew the signs, making them curvier and gentler than Continental equivalents.
For the farm animal warning sign, she based the cow on Patience, a cow on a relation’s farm in Warwickshire. The girl in the ‘School children crossing’ sign was based on a photograph of Calvert as a child. She also dreamt up the idea of having an older girl leading a younger boy by the hand, to build an emotional connection in drivers’ minds, and make them slow down.
The previous sign, of a boy in a school cap, was, according to Calvert ‘quite archaic, almost like an illustration from Enid Blyton … I wanted to make it more inclusive because comprehensives were starting up.’
Kinneir and Calvert went on to devise the Rail Alphabet typeface for British Rail trains and stations in 1964. The metalware designer David Mellor designed the cutlery for the restaurant cars, and Gerald Barney, of the Design Research Unit, came up with the familiar BR symbol.
Like motorway signs, fingerposts, too, were standardized, under the Worboys Committee in 1964. Before then, different counties had different signposts – octagonal oak white posts with black pen-top-shaped finials were used in Sussex; Northumberland’s were topped with handsome pointed acorns.3
England’s motorway revolution began in earnest with the M1. Built by Sir Owen Williams and Partners, the M1 was first discussed in 1951, and given the go-ahead in 1955. It was officially unveiled in 1958, as the ‘London–Yorkshire motorway’, by the Transport Minister, Harold Watkinson, at a spot on the tarmac near Luton. The first fifty-five miles cut through Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in 1959, between what are now junctions 5 and 18.
England’s first service station, Watford Gap, between junctions 16 and 17 of the M1, was also built in 1959, although there had been wayside eating places for centuries: the Clacket Lane service station on the M25 in Surrey is on the site of a stopover for pilgrims travelling to the Canterbury shrine of Thomas Becket.
The first AA petrol station, incidentally, was opened on the Bath Road, Aldermaston, Berkshire, forty years earlier, on 2 March 1919; petrol stations are now in decline, as small village outlets close down – of the 18,000 in the UK in 1992, fewer than half survive today.
Founded in 1905, the AA built much of the early road infrastructure: it installed thousands of direction posts and village signs, until responsibility was gradually handed to local authorities in the 1930s. Into the 1960s, the AA’s uniformed motorbike patrolmen saluted oncoming members bearing visible AA badges; they would dispense with the convention, in order to alert motorists to imminent speedtraps.
More than 130 bridges were built on the first stretch of the M1, in six standard types. Many survive today: distinctly chunky in silhouette, reminiscent of prewar German autobahns, built of concrete, supported by elementary columns in the central reservation. The columns had no base or capital, but did have an abacus, a plain slab on top of each column. The retaining walls for the first motorways were also concrete; as they mostly remain today.
The lane system remains much the same, too, usually with three lanes in either direction. The standard width of our original motorways, widened when the first four-lane motorways arrived, is 105 feet, with 13 feet for the central reservation.
When we built those first motorways, we were a long way behind Italy, where the first motorway in the world was built in 1924; when Mussolini came to power in 1925, he encouraged further expansion of the network. Hitler, too, it must be admitted, was also a motorway progressive, enthusiastically backing autobahn construction projects after he became Chancellor in 1933.
Slow progress, due to parochialism and lack of money and space, meant our motorways never matched the scale and ambition of those Continental motorways. Still, in our characteristic, make-do-and-mend, postwar attitude, we were pathetically proud of what small projects we did complete – some comedown from the Victorian glory days of British engineering.
Jayne Mansfield opened the Chiswick flyover in September 1959, in an era when there was still some glamour left in road travel.
‘It’s a sweet little flyover,’ Mansfield said, as she declared it open. Little was the operative word – it was a quarter of a mile long.
The new motorways were considered such thrilling wonders that there was a great fanfare when the M1 was opened; a workman was photographed sweeping the opening section of road to keep the new treasure spotless.
Barely half a century later, in July 2010, we had grown so tired of motorways that a list of the worst of them was published.4 The M25 was voted Britain’s most depressing road, with the 117-mile motorway singled out for particularly terrible traffic jams and extreme tedium.
Britain’s top ten most depressing roads were, in order: the M25; the stretch of the M6 by Birmingham; the A1 Holloway Road, London; the M5 near Bristol; the M8 between Glasgow and Edinburgh; the A12; the M5 northbound between junctions 12 and 10; the A361 near Glastonbury in Somerset; the A30 near Bodmin in Cornwall; the A338 between Great Shefford; and junction 14 of the M4.
Over the last half-century, the biggest change to our roads – the one that has made that tedium worse – is the sheer amount of traffic. During rush hour, the car-borne population in Britain and Ireland is greater than the population of London. There are now 31 million cars in Britain, and rising. The inevitable result is the Great British Traffic Jam.
We have grown used to the standardization of our newer roads, particularly motorways slicing their unremitting, straight, flat lines through the landscape. But, before motorways were introduced under the Special Roads Act of 1949, English roads were more flexible, idiosyncratic things. Those old prewar roads, plenty of which survive, chimed with the familiar English taste for a touch of wildness. As G. K. Chesterton put it, in The Rolling English Road:
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
Wandering English hedges often track and shelter English roads, as Chesterton writes later in the poem: ‘Why do flowers run behind [the rolling English drunkard, busy making the rolling English road]; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?’ In turn, the hedges and those early roads hugged the wavy contours of hilltops, valley floors and field edges.
Chesterton was right about the straightness of Roman roads. The Fosse Way – from the Latin fossa, meaning a ditch – runs between the Roman military camps of Exeter and Lincoln. It originally marked the border of early imperial territory before the Romans broke out of the south and headed north towards the Scottish border. And it is extremely straight – on the 182-mile stretch from Lincoln to Ilchester, Somerset, the road never veers more than six miles from a straight line.
Main roads today often still run along the course of old Roman roads. Where the A2 crosses the River Medway at Rochester, it runs alongside the old Roman road to Dover. Later called Waecelinga Straet by the Anglo-Saxons, it morphed into Watling Street, which runs all the way to the Roman fortress at Caerleon in Newport, south Wales.
Modern Rochester High Street was once part of Watling Street, running north of the cathedral and parallel with the nave; an ancient road-planning convention followed at Hereford Cathedral, too. Another convention was that minor Roman and Anglo-Saxon settlements tended not to be built too close to the road; that would have made them vulnerable to attacking armies.
This tendency for new transport routes to shadow earlier ones continued into the modern age. The M1 runs roughly parallel with the Grand Junction Canal, begun in 1790 by William Jessop, and the old Midland Railway – all following the flattest, straightest route north from London, passing through Watford Gap.
Leicester lies not only on the line of the 1768 Manchester–London stagecoach route, but also on the nineteenth-century Midland Railway, as well as the M1. Because it was on the Loughborough Canal by 1794, and the Leicester and Swannington Railway by 1832, the city’s population increased from 6,000 at the beginning of the eighteenth century to 17,000 by 1800.
Celts laid the foundations for several Roman roads. Watling Street was originally an ancient Celtic trackway, later paved by the Romans. In 2011, archaeologists uncovered a Bronze Age livestock driveway near the A5 at Shrewsbury. In the first century BC, before the Romans turned up, the Celts built a cambered, forty-mile-long highway, surfaced with cobbles laid on top of a foundation of elder wood and silt. When the Romans arrived, they quickly adopted the highly sophisticated road for their own use.
For all their sophistication, Roman roads are responsible for the narrowness of our train seats today. The first Victorian trains were built to the same width as horse-drawn wagons; they, in turn, were designed to fit the ruts left in the roads by Roman chariots. The standard British railway gauge – 4 feet 8.5 inches – mirrors the specification for a Roman war chariot: that width, the Romans thought, accommodated a large horse’s bottom, while also allowing for a little wriggle room on either side. As our own bottoms have grown bigger, those seats have grown more uncomfortable.
Similar ancient constrictions clog main roads leading out of town centres. These are often laid on top of old coaching roads, squeezed in on both sides by immovable Victorian terraces. Because they were built later, American cities, to a certain extent – and newer American suburbs to a greater extent – were designed for the car. Empty eight-lane highways lead out of small, out-of-the-way towns. Those wide, open suburbs tend to sprawl for miles beyond the city limits because of the vast, cheap American land bank.
Roman road junctions also dictated the sites of modern towns. Winchester, the Roman town of Venta Belgarum, is at the hub of six Roman roads; roads to Mildenhall, Wiltshire, and Silchester still run along two of those ancient routes. This efficient, extensive network of Roman roads also created the first English commuters: most Roman villas in Hampshire were within fifteen miles – or a day’s ride – of Winchester town centre.
Heavy commuting traffic isn’t a new thing. The traffic-relieving bypass goes back several thousand years. The Icknield Way – the Roman, possibly Celtic, road running through Berkshire and Oxfordshire – often splits in two, where a side road is diverted through a village, before joining up again.
Even medieval bypasses didn’t stop medieval traffic congestion. In 1285, Edward I wrote to the Prior of Dunstable about the crossroads of the Icknield Way with Watling Street, at Dunstable, complaining that the highways were ‘broken up and deep by the frequent passage of carts’.
Ancient holloways – the deep-sunken lanes of England – are usually the result of similar erosion by wheels, rain and footfall, although occasionally they were laid along sunken ravines. They are most commonly found in the ancient landscapes of Sudbury in Suffolk, south-west Wiltshire and the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall.5
Medieval roads swerved around all sorts of things – boulders, holes, tree trunks, dead horses – and those swerves became incorporated into the line of the road. If you drive along a minor, ancient road today, with a swerving hedge on the left, and a straight one on the right, the chances are that a farmer has nabbed the land to the right and fashioned a new straight border to it.6
Those medieval roads that are straight tend to be narrower than those laid down by the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drove roads traditionally had wider verges to allow cattle and sheep to crop the grass as they were herded along. The post-enclosure roads were even straighter, too, running from village to village in as efficient a way as possible, unencumbered by the forest or wilderness cleared by enclosure. Older, bending roads fell into disuse, or became bridlepaths or rights of way.
Later, centrally planned roads usually had even, wide grass verges, thick with cow parsley and dog roses in the summer. Their dimensions were often laid down by diktat. New Somerset roads, laid in 1795, were 40 foot wide, with 12 feet of stone thoroughfare in the middle, flanked by 14 feet of verge on either side. The stone was a foot deep in the middle of the road; at the cambered edges, it narrowed down to 9 inches thick.
There were different widths for roads of mounting importance, a version of the later distinctions between A and B roads. In Norton Juxta Twycross parish, on the Leicestershire– Warwickshire borders, the 1748 enclosure document declares that the main road to London must be no less than 33 yards wide. The neighbouring minor road from Twycross to the market town of Ashby de la Zouch had to be no less than 22 yards, while other nearby roads are given the indiscriminate definition ‘of a proper width’.7
Road dimensions were dictated by local conditions, the weather in particular. In winter, the main London–Exeter road could expand to a quarter of a mile wide where it ran through flooded parts of Salisbury Plain, as horses edged further and further from the waterlogged middle of the road.
Differing dates of enclosure heavily influenced the road map of England. In counties that were enclosed later on, like Leicestershire, enclosed in the Georgian period, the relatively few main roads were usually laid along the lines of heavily used farm tracks. This led to fewer roads than in, say, Devon, enclosed in the medieval period, where many more minor tracks were turned into roads earlier on, and have remained as roads ever since.
Enclosure practices also explain why you suddenly come across small country roads turning at a right angle at lone farmhouses in the middle of, say, Norfolk. Neighbouring parishes were enclosed at different times. A road heading out to a house on the border of one parish might be planned long before a later road to the house was built in a neighbouring parish. The later road, then, was connected with the earlier one at an extreme angle.
A similar effect occurs in parts of the Fens. In the seventeenth century, the roads were laid independently of each other, in allotted areas of two or three square miles. In the third great draining of the Fens, in 1650–55, each plot was individually planned by careless surveyors, who failed to consider the future disposition of roads in neighbouring allotments.
This led not just to roads connecting at strange angles, but also to roads that don’t meet those in the neighbouring allotment at all – they just come to an abrupt halt, connecting with nothing. The effect is particularly noticeable around Littleport, Cambridgeshire.8
These independent arrangements for small chunks of England gradually disappeared through the seventeenth-century improvement of the roads, particularly with the increasing popularity, and efficiency, of stagecoaches.
The system of short stage traffic began under James I. Horses were changed at every ten-mile ‘stage’ of the journey; so it made sense to establish stabling at each staging point. The hamlets and towns at these staging points mushroomed, as the stables gathered around them an elaborate collection of lodgings, dining rooms and booking offices. Coaching inns had arrived; wayside hotels that grew increasingly elaborate until horse-drawn transport was eclipsed by the arrival of the train in the 1830s. They had a lasting effect on the look of English towns and cities – and on the standards of English hospitality.
Complaints about Fawlty Towers standards of roadside catering are nothing new. In Henry IV, Part I, Shakespeare sets a scene at the inn yard in Rochester, Kent.
‘Peas and beans are as dank here as a dog,’ says a guest, ‘This house is turned upside down since Robin Ostler died. I think this be the most villainous house in all London Road for fleas: I am stung like a tench.’
The low standards of Shakespearean inns were improved in 1616 when Giles Mompesson, MP for the rotten borough of Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire, established a new monopoly on granting licences to inns. By 1621, there were 13,000 licensed premises in the country.
These new inns were vastly more comfortable than Shakespeare’s dingy inn at Rochester. In 1617, Fynes Moryson wrote, in his Itinerary; or Ten Years’ Travels throughout Great Britain and other parts of Europe:
The world affords not such inns as England hath, for as soon as a passenger comes, the servants run to him: one takes his horse, and walks him till he be cold, then rubs him and gives him meat … another gives the traveller his private chamber, and kindles his fire, the third pulls off his boots and makes him clean.
Tolls, introduced by the first Turnpike Act of 1663, paid for improved roads, allowing fast coaches to supplant the old slow coaches and carriers’ wagons.
The more sophisticated road network led to the first road atlas, published in 1675 by John Ogilby (1600–1676), a courtier, theatre owner, poet, dancing master, translator and compiler of atlases and geographical works. Ogilby’s Britannia … an Illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales: by a Geographical and Historical Description Thereof consisted of a hundred strip maps with the road divided up into sections, each of twenty or so miles. This first atlas covered a total of 2,519 miles.
Through the eighteenth century, the road network stretched its tentacles across the country, paying for itself by those tolls. Many toll houses survive today – often set at an angle to the road, with a window facing the approaching traffic, where the toll could be collected. The improved turnpike roads often led to older, minor roads disappearing. Two out of the three Great North Roads in Huntingdonshire are now just bridleways.9
The new wave of coaches and post-chaises brought a tide of money for improvements to the inns. There was no set form to them, beyond the principle of having one yard surrounded by lodgings, and another for stabling and wagons. The traditional London coaching inn consisted of a house facing the street, equipped with sitting rooms and eating parlours; that facade was punctured by an entry and exit to the courtyards behind. A ground-floor passage connected the bar with the coffee room, with a drawing room on the first floor.
Dickens described the coaching inn complex of the White Hart in Southwark in The Pickwick Papers (1837):
A double tier of bedroom galleries, with old clumsy balustrades, ran round two sides of the straggling area, and a double row of bells to correspond, sheltered from the weather by a little sloping roof, hung over the door leading to the bar and coffee-room. Two or three gigs and chaise-carts were wheeled up under different little sheds and penthouses.
As highway robbery increased with growing road traffic and a rise in jobless soldiers, some coaching inns, in cahoots with the highwaymen, had ‘hides’ added, where the likes of Dick Turpin – himself the son of the innkeeper at the Crown at Hempstead, Essex – could be concealed.
Highwaymen had been a problem since the thirteenth century. In 1285, a statute was passed, commanding that 60ft trenches be built between main roads and woodland, so travellers could spot highwaymen emerging from the trees. Traces of the trenches survive in Hatfield Forest, Essex, and Wychwood Forest, Oxfordshire.
The eighteenth-century traffic boom meant old Tudor inns – like the George Hotel in Stamford, Lincolnshire, originally built in 1568 – were given ornate makeovers. The stable yard at the back of the George still consists of three ranges of late-medieval buildings. The fourth range is the hotel, given an elaborate, three-storey, five-bay front by George Portwood in 1724.
By the late eighteenth century, coaching inns were the heart of Georgian life. Dinners, dances and public meetings brought in the gentry from the surrounding country, and elaborate extensions were built to house assembly rooms and ballrooms. These ballrooms were planned on a spectacular scale, their walls – so Evelyn Waugh described them – ‘encrusted with plaster sphinxes, garlands, goats, Muses and urns’.10
Coaching inns sited at the terminus of a London route were particularly extravagant – like the Old Ship Hotel in Brighton, built facing the sea, between the two piers. A late-seventeenth-century inn, the Old Ship, was rebuilt in 1755, and soon drew in the local gratin. Fanny Burney dined there in 1779; a decade later, coaching inns were stamped with the royal seal of approval when the Prince of Wales visited a ball held in his honour at the Old Ship, taking in the Adamesque Assembly Room, with its shallow vaulted ceiling, and ballroom built in 1767 by Robert Golden.
Jane Austen was a regular, with her mother and sister, Cassandra, at the ballroom of the Dolphin Hotel in Southampton, then the fashionable town of Hampshire. She went as much as she could, she wrote, in order ‘to have a good bargain’. The Dolphin was originally built in the fifteenth century; in 1760, it was given its robustly confident, red-brick, pedimented facade, with a stuccoed, rusticated ground floor, and its mammoth, swelling bow windows on the upper floors, either side of the arms of William IV and Queen Adelaide.
Coaching traffic mingled with high society and military and naval top brass at what was the finest eighteenth-century house in the city. The historian Edward Gibbon, a captain in the Hampshire militia, visited often. Thackeray wrote Pendennis there from 1848 to 1850; Queen Victoria stayed, too, stabling her horses at the Dolphin on the way to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Even as late as 1914, Field Marshal Haig used the coaching inn as his HQ for the embarkation of the British Expeditionary Force for France.
The golden age of the coaching inn was the early nineteenth century. In one of the biggest expansions of the road network, between 1803 and 1823, over 1,000 miles of roads, with new bridges, were laid across the country, at a regulation 60 feet wide.
By 1835, most main roads had been coated with the new type of tarmac, thanks to John McAdam’s revolutionary ‘macadamized’ road surface. Previous roads built by the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford (1757–1834) were three-decker sandwiches of gravel, laid on small stones, laid on stone blocks – pretty much the same as the old Roman roads.
The system developed in 1816 by McAdam (1756–1836) worked without the expensive foundation, depending instead on a cambered layer of crushed stone on large stones, with a surface of ground stone bound with the macadamized material, set hard by rain and traffic.11 Tarmac, a mixture of ironstone slag and bitumen, was first produced in 1902, and developed by the County Surveyor of Northampton.12 By 1930, most English roads had been coated with tarmac; many smaller, rural roads remained with their flint surfaces intact into the 1950s.
For all these advances, the coaching inn was doomed by the advent of the railway. In 1829, Stephenson’s Rocket made its maiden journey; the following year, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened. By 1845, the train’s victory over the horse was complete. Once the sprawling coaching inns began losing custom to the new railway hotels, they became half-empty pubs or were converted into private houses.
Staffordshire – the Potteries viewed from Basford, 1850. Note the train in the middle distance, sounding the death knell of the coaching inn.
Still, coaching inns left a semantic legacy to the trains: the terms ‘booking office’ and ‘waiting room’ were handed on, and the guard of the coach became the guard of the train. For many years, the train guard wore the old coach guard’s uniform, including the tall hat worn by the Fat Controller in Thomas the Tank Engine.
Memories of the coaching inn live on, too, in countless pubs called the Coach and Horses, like the Soho local of the late Jeffrey Bernard, the Spectator’s Low Life correspondent. Private Eye’s fortnightly lunches are still held there in the first-floor dining room. The former editor, Richard Ingrams, and current editor, Ian Hislop, preside over a merry table, with simple fare washed down with plenty of wine to get the gossip flowing.
The atmosphere is not far removed from the old coaching inns, caught in the old song bellowed in early-nineteenth-century stagecoaches:
It is a cold and stormy night, I’m wetted to the skin,
But I’ll bear it with contentment until I reach the inn,
And then I’ll get a-drinking with the landlord and his kin.
Railways dominated the English transport system until the growth of the mass-market car in the middle of the last century. The first long English car journey ever made – by a ‘petroleum motor carriage’ in 1895, travelling fifty-six miles between Hampshire and Berkshire – took five hours and thirty-two minutes.13 By the 1930s, cars could easily go at 70 mph, and were being allowed to go faster and faster: the 1930 Road Traffic Act abolished the 20 mph speed limit.
The volume of cars, too, was expanding, now they were affordable: the Morris Minor, introduced in 1931, and the Ford Model Y, built in Dagenham, Essex, from 1932, were Britain’s first £100 cars. For all the advances in prewar car design, the roads they ran on lagged behind in sophistication. In 1939, the 276-mile-long Great North Road from London to Newcastle was still entirely single carriageway. These early roads were tremendously dangerous, too: the number of road deaths was higher in the 1930s than today.
That sophistication gap between car and road continued until the arrival of the motorway – the great landscape monument of the second half of the twentieth century. Even today, our motorways remain a pale imitation of German autobahns and Italian autostrade; let alone America’s splendid freeways, with their expansive grassy central reservations, minimizing accidents (decreased, too, by lower speed limits) and allowing the use of smaller crash barriers.
Still, for all their international shortcomings, British roads have vanquished the railways, just as railways eclipsed horse-borne road traffic in the 1830s: 84 per cent of all journeys are now made by road.
And it’s likely to stay that way. In March 2011, the Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond, admitted that the domination of road over rail is such that the rail infrastructure could no longer handle the volume of traffic on the roads: every 1 per cent fall in road traffic, he said, would lead to a 16 per cent rise in the passenger load of already overcrowded trains, if the traffic were transferred to the railways.
There is another powerful difference between our roads, and American and Continental ones. Of the five most popular Google questions about the English, ‘Why do the English drive on the left?’ is number one; followed by ‘… drink so much?; … have such bad teeth?; … dislike the French?; … make fun of the Welsh?’
The most popular – if apocryphal – reason is that, in the Middle Ages, you drove on the left to keep your right arm free to wield your sword or lance at approaching traffic. In 1300, Pope Bonifacio VIII formalized the practice by telling all his pilgrims to stick to the left. While we clung on to the habit, as did most of our colonies, the French moved to the right after the Revolution. The left side of the road had previously been hogged by the aristocracy, forcing the peasantry to the right – a habit formalized after the Revolution.
America increasingly drove on the right after the War of Independence. The custom gradually spread to Canada, but only slowly; Newfoundland, once a British protectorate, drove on the left until 1947.
In September 2009, Samoa, in the South Pacific, switched to the left. The Government said it was more convenient to import right-hand-drive cars from Australia and New Zealand than expensive American gas-guzzlers.
Our approach to road travel differs significantly from Continental Europeans, and not just because of the side of the road we drive on. For one thing, we haven’t gone through the bicycling revolution that hit the Continent over a century ago. Even though bicycling is on the up – bike use on London’s roads has more than doubled in the last decade – we are still not a natural bicycling country.
You don’t see ranks of elderly men, shrink-wrapped in Lycra, racing along A-roads on skeletal racers, the way you do in France. The British like their children to learn how to ride a bike – a third of all UK households own a bicycle – but they think it’s an activity best confined to childhood. Fewer than 5 per cent of all British journeys are made by bicycle, and only 3 per cent of British workers bicycle to work.
The idea that adults were too grown-up to bicycle was present from its Victorian beginnings. In 1888, a horse-rider complained to the police about being held up by racing bicyclists on the Great North Road. The National Cyclists’ Union, terrified that anti-bike legislation would be introduced, declared that all mass-start road racing should be banned; it was forbidden until the 1950s.
Bicycling continued to be a second-class mode of transport into the twentieth century. The Cyclists’ Touring Club, founded in Britain in 1878, even opposed bicycle paths in the 1930s; in their defensive paranoia, they thought bike paths might prevent bicyclists using the road.14
We have only recently imitated what countries like Holland did in the 1970s, i.e. make a conscious decision to turn from the car towards the bicycle; thus the woefully inadequate state, and limited amount, of our bike lanes. Two per cent of secondary school children bicycle to school in Britain, compared to 30 per cent in Holland.
For most of the twentieth century, the British Government promoted cars over bicycles. Encouraged by the beginnings of a motorway network, the oil and car lobby, and the discovery of North Sea oil – and not least because car manufacture employs more people than bicycle frame-building, and oil people are richer than bike people – the car industry took precedence over bicycling interests.
Railways suffered, too, from the deferential attitude to the all-powerful car; the bulk of our freight now goes by road instead of by rail, unlike on the Continent.
This dismissive attitude towards bikes is also latently to do with snobbery – up until the 1960s, the bicycle was regarded as the poor man’s transport in Britain, as it still is in India; while the car was seen as the symbol of the future, money and postwar progress.
For a century, we have worshipped the car over the bicycle. And that love of cars, combined with an inadequate road system, has led to a hatred of bicyclists. Bicycling is still seen as an odd way to get about; something you do as a child, or for pleasure, never a pragmatic way of getting around.
The same attitude exists in America; but not in Continental Europe. On a recent trip to Groningen in northern Holland, I took a taxi at rush hour and it was practically the only car on the streets. In 1972, the Groningen authorities made a conscious decision to make the bicycle the dominant mode of transport, closing off the city centre to all private vehicles, and allowing only buses, taxis and business vehicles. Sixty per cent of all journeys in the town are now made by bike.
Bikes were soon understood to be the best way of getting to work. No one turned up too sweaty at the office, because no one was bicycling particularly quickly – they all followed a steady universal pace. Bicycling was so completely incorporated into daily life that couples bike hand in hand, each leaving one hand on the handlebars.
If you did this in England, someone would throw something at you; in Holland, it is no different to walking hand in hand.
As Britain moved out of the years of rationed austerity after the war, and the new motorways appeared in the late 1950s, car ownership soared; and new street furniture was needed to accommodate the new arrivals on the road.
The man responsible for buying it was Ernest Marples, the Conservative Minister of Transport from 1959 to 1964. Marples introduced parking meters (designed by Kenneth Grange, the man who designed the Intercity 125 in 1968), seat belts, traffic wardens and double yellow lines.
Single yellow lines were first used by police in 1956, on the kerbs of the West End, to stop illegal parking outside Chinese restaurants. Double yellow lines were introduced by the Road Traffic Act of 1960; although a Yorkshire farmer, George Bamber, used them in the late nineteenth century as boundary markers around his farm, inspired by the markings on his sheep.15
Street furniture has been around for a while. Milestones came in under Charles II; the Romans used them, too, but none survives in situ. The London–Dover Road was equipped with mile marks in 1663. The earliest surviving milestone was set up at Trumpington, near Cambridge, in 1727. By 1773, an Act was passed, enforcing milestones on major roads.16
Street furniture proliferated with the spread of turnpike roads through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bollards – originally wooden posts erected to protect pedestrians from carriages – became popular after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Swanage, Dorset, became the centre of bollard manufacture. Old military hardware, especially cannons, was used. Bollards were made in different materials in different counties, with granite used on Dartmoor and millstone grit in Bakewell, Derbyshire.17
Pedestrian crossings, with their Belisha Beacons (originally twice their current height), were introduced in 1934 by Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Transport Minister, after he was nearly run over by a sports car in Camden High Street, north London. But, still, before the war, there was barely any other street furniture needed to keep the sparse traffic in check.
Even as late as 1969, when the Beatles were photographed for their Abbey Road album – in Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, north London – there wasn’t much street furniture around. There are no yellow lines, no parking signs, no parking payment machines and, even with free parking, very few parked cars. A VW Beetle is breezily parked on the kerb to the left, and a cab further down on the right, but there are no other cars parked in the first fifty yards beyond the famous zebra crossing, which has no white zig-zags leading up to it. The road, too, is almost completely, blissfully empty – off in the distance, between the heads of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, you can just make out a solitary pair of cars about to pass each other.
These days, yellow lines, white zig-zags and even red lines are thickly painted over our streets, now jam-packed with parked cars.
Over the last two decades, the growth in street furniture has been exponential: according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the RAC Foundation, 70 per cent of rural road signs are now unnecessary. That street furniture has also grown increasingly minimalist and utilitarian in look – the old black iron flambeaux on top of traffic lights were gradually removed through the 1970s.
There are a few honourable exceptions to the street furniture invasion: in 2003, Kensington Council removed as many signs as possible from Kensington High Street, and accidents fell by 47 per cent. In 2011, European street-planning initiatives were introduced in nearby Exhibition Road. There are fewer road markings and no difference in height between kerb, pavement and road; an 80cm strip of ridged paving helps the blind work out when they’re approaching the road. The idea is that drivers, previously mollycoddled by signage, then begin to take their own precautions against crashing.
Beneath all that street furniture, basic road construction hasn’t changed much in recent years; as I saw recently, when my own street, Caversham Road, in Kentish Town, north London, was dug up. Workmen had dug a 5ft-deep trench in the road. A club sandwich of tarmac on concrete was revealed, over a layer of rubble from buildings blitzed in the Second World War. Underneath that was 50-million-year-old London clay from the Eocene period.
Towards the side of the road, by the Dartmoor granite (known as ‘Big Granite’) kerbstones, the workmen had exposed the old Victorian road, made up of sarsen silcrete setts. Placed together in a grid, like flat cobblestones, these small cubes of sandstone came from Cranborne Chase. A few original wooden cobbles – like those in Endell Street, Covent Garden – still survive in England, often near hospitals and in rich areas, where silence was at a premium.
The new road the workmen built in Caversham Road had a foundation of hardcore, or crushed stone. On top of that, they laid the classic ingredients of the modern road: two layers of bitumen mixed with tiny chunks of limestone.
Our tarmac roads remain peculiarly susceptible to potholes. In colder countries, like Sweden, the road stays frozen for months and then thaws once, at the end of winter. In England, it’s freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw. In a bad winter, like those of 2009–10 and 2010–11, the freeze-thaw process happened over fifty times.
That cycle is appalling for road surfaces: potholes are formed when the water seeps into tarmac, freezes and then thaws, cracking and crumbling the road surface. When the ice melts, more water seeps inside the crack and the problem worsens during the next freeze. When the crack is wide enough, the surface collapses and a pothole develops. Recent cold snaps are thought to have taken the number of potholes up to 2 million, one hole for every 180 yards of the 200,000 miles of local roads in England and Wales.
And why does water get beneath the surface? Aside from old age, the most frequent cause is roadworks. However well a road is mended, there’ll be spots where the old and new surfaces just don’t meld together. By opening up a road once, you reduce its life by up to 60 per cent. Those cracks are usually caused by the ‘utility openings’ made to repair water and electricity lines, gas pipes and communications cables. Thirty-seven utilities have the right to dig up London’s roads; 90 per cent of the work is done by BT, Virgin Media, Thames Water, EDF Energy, National Grid and Scotia Gas.
Pavements and kerbstones have a longer shelf-life than the potholed roads they flank. Yorkstone, originally quarried in Yorkshire but also quarried elsewhere, is the classic paving stone. The tight-grained sandstone – rich in iron oxides, feldspar, clay, mica and quartz – weathers so gracefully that it’s often ripped off the streets by opportunist cowboys. There are other varieties of paving stone, too: in Shropshire, they used Dhustone, a basalt from the Clee Hills.
Kerbstones, which have to bear the brunt of bad parking, still tend to be made of granite, as they have been since the early nineteenth century. Granite kerbstones for much of England came from Cornwall and the Channel Islands in the nineteenth century, where they were carried as ballast for ships taking vegetables to the mainland.
Across the country you’ll see granite kerbstones that have been ‘chitted’ – i.e. roughened and dimpled, to stop pedestrians slipping. Merged with the granite in the kerbstone, there are also pools of darker diorite – another igneous, volcanic and extremely hard stone. Diorite was used on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral to take the footfall of millions of visitors, whose shoes have buffed the dark, dull stone to a gleaming sheen.
Both diorite and granite were heavily quarried in Leicestershire in the nineteenth century. The granite of Mountsorrel, Leicestershire, was first quarried for road stone in the late 1820s, when a group of Scotsmen, from the granite city of Aberdeen, came south to dig it out.
Pink-granite Leicestershire setts were used to pave roads all over England, and the M1 was largely built on a foundation of crushed Mountsorrel stone. A whole hill in Markfield, Leicestershire, once topped by a windmill, was quarried into oblivion for road-building.
Much of our British road-building stone has now been quarried out. When Exhibition Road was relaid in 2011, in line with those European street-planning initiatives, they had to use Chinese granite because the original quarry in northern England had run out of stone.
We now can’t even provide enough domestic salt for gritting the streets in winter. Our pink rock salt comes in 6mm granules, from Winsford in Cheshire, Boulby in Cleveland, and County Antrim. Cheshire has been mined for rock salt since Roman times; many of the county’s meres were formed by salt-mining subsidence, caused by hundreds of miles of subterranean tunnels.
But domestic salt supply is limited. When demand outpaced our 30,000-tonnes-a-week domestic capacity in January 2009, in the worst snow since 1981, 21,000 tonnes of salt were shipped from Egypt.
These days England’s roads not only roll less merrily and less mazily than in Chesterton’s time; they are also increasingly unlikely to be made out of English materials.