roads

roads. Medieval Britain inherited around 10,000 miles of Roman road, combined with an extensive network of trackways following less clearly defined routes. Difficult terrain and hills led to multiple pathways being employed, many still visible to aerial photography, and recognized by the statute of Winchester (1285), which prescribed a 400-foot clear tract for main roads as a preventive to brigands. Such largely ‘soft’ roads were capable of bearing extensive traffic, including from the 14th cent. enhanced use of carts, their tracks leading to fords and bridges. These, and customary uses, were recorded in place-names, such as Saltersford. Early maps show Britain's trunk roads: Matthew Paris (c.1250) mapped the route from Dover via London to Berwick; and the Gough map (c.1360) records around 3,000 miles of roads, 40 per cent on the Roman lines, and the local networks in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

From the 16th cent., traffic growth combined with closer definition of property boundaries to channel roads more precisely. Concentrated usage from the 1560s by wagons impacted adversely on this strip, and legislation introduced four days a year of ‘statute labour’ for all householders (1555, extended to six days in 1563) with their equipment, in place of common obligation, and from 1662 this could be commuted to rates. Continuing pressures after 1600 led to county initiatives to create paved causeways for packhorses, to adopt and erect bridges, and to signpost the way (directed by statute in 1697). Road books began with Ogilby's Britannia (1675), and became pocket-sized with Bowen (1720). The increasing employment of vehicles, even in the Pennines, enforced the realignment of roads to less demanding gradients, changes further developed by turnpikes. Legislation was passed to preserve road surfaces by restricting the size and draught teams of vehicles (1621, 1662, 1741) and the breadth of wheels (1718, 1753). Higher standards of engineering on Telford or McAdam principles after 1810 reduced the need for such restraints, but weight-related tolls priced the economical steam carriages available from the later 1820s off the turnpike.

The dualism of road management lasted to 1894, when the parish repair was eliminated: turnpike debts had soared as long-distance traffic was lost to the railways from the late 1830s, but despite some consolidation into unitary trusts—London (1826) and south Wales (1844)—and dissolution by the Local Government Board from 1872, most turnpike trusts lasted until the new county councils (1888), and the last to 1895. By then, road usage had already revived for feeder services to and from railways; into the growing towns; for the safety bicycle after 1880, and steam and motor vehicles. Rising traffic and the heavy dust created by automobiles led to the improvement of surfaces by tarring from 1904, replacing one environmental hazard with another, as the run-off from roads poisoned fish. The ‘Red Flag’ and 4 m.p.h. legislation of 1865, intended to restrict road steam locomotives, had restrained all traffic growth, and only in 1896 were speed limits raised to 14 m.p.h. (reduced by the Local Government Board to 12 m.p.h.), raised to 20 m.p.h. in 1903, and abolished outside built-up areas in 1930.

Road use grew rapidly from the mid-1920s, with around 3 million commercial vehicles, motor-cycles, and cars registered in 1938, and the 1930s were a ‘golden age’ for all but casualties: 120,000 were killed on British roads, 1918–39. The period thus saw the introduction of new speed limits, the driving test, and Hore-Belisha's pedestrian crossings (1934); the transfer to county authorities of responsibility for major roads (1929); and of 4,500 miles of ‘trunk’ roads to the ministry (1936). Road-building was a favoured object of unemployment relief schemes. The concept of a segregated motorway was discussed, evaluated by a delegation to Germany in 1937, and the London to Birmingham route surveyed (1938). Post-war, passenger miles by road quadrupled between the 1950s and the 1990s, and ton miles of goods rose rather more, with by 1990 more than nine-tenths of all traffic on roads. Their full economic and environmental costs were more slowly appreciated, but the success of roads has made them a central item of the public policy debate in the 1990s. See motorways.

J. A. Chartres