transport was critical to the evolution of the nation state, and explains some of Britain's historical differences from its European neighbours. It helped to determine the early success of England as a political entity, its patterns of social and geographical mobility, and the close economic integration that helped to make Britain the first ‘industrial nation’.

Post-Roman Britain lacked a single capital, and its transport system was diffuse, focused on the port, market, church, and seigneurial hall in a plurality of political and economic zones. In England, the gradual emergence of London as capital city in the 13th and 14th cents. re-established the hub of a transport system, and the crown, the law, the court, the Exchequer, and associated institutions created a powerful centripetal influence, never replicated in Scotland or Wales. London's influence on Britain's transport grew thereafter, through its disproportionate demand for provisions and its dominance in international trade. Its function as central location for services, and for craft and business training, meant that by 1700 perhaps a quarter of England's population had experienced life in the capital. turnpikes reinforced this focus, but after 1750 canals and railways also reflected other urban demands, and created a transport system profiled as a St Andrew's cross, centred on the midlands, and framed by coastal shipping, and the Edinburgh–Glasgow route. The decline of traditional industries in the 20th cent., with the growth of air travel, and the rise of services and big government, increasingly restored London as the sole hub of British transport.

Transport influenced perceptions of distance and time, and through this the sense of place. In the horse-drawn world before 1770, market and county town were objects of weekly and seasonal travel, the capital a place for temporary or life-cycle migration; a century later, London and Edinburgh were accessible to overnight visitors from most parts of England and Scotland; by the 1980s London's rail commuting zone, bounded by the 100-minute journey, enveloped Bristol (122 miles distant), Birmingham (105), Norwich (114), and Doncaster (159), radically ‘reshaping’ the country. The railways also unified Britain into a single time zone in the 1850s, and the telegraph's instantaneous communication transformed the transmission of news beyond that of the fastest post or courier. With such transport change, and the induced shift in the perception of this island, the linguistic confusion of ‘county’ and ‘country’, so common before 1700, declined and disappeared.

The transport of information interacted with that of goods, and thus personal experiences of scarcity or plenty, and local and regional autonomy in the supply of food or fuel. The provisioning of medieval London, in 1400 around 4 per cent of the nation, was a complex transport problem demanding the integration of carts, river vessels, and coasters, which increased as that proportion rose to 11 per cent in 1700. Londoners dined on the meat of the Highland and Welsh cattle that had walked in droves south; on Dales sheep and Norfolk turkeys and geese also driven overland; on Thames-borne cheese, treated generically as ‘Double Gloucester’; with Fulham or Putney vegetables, sustained by the reciprocating transport of manure; and washed them down with London porter, brewed from the dark malts shipped down the River Lea. Each shift in transport dislocated the equilibrium of supplies, and induced hostility from the threatened or the dispossessed: from the early modern grain wagon attacked by villagers as the proximate cause of their hunger, to Newcastle upon Tyne's vehement opposition to the navigation of Sunderland's river Wear, to those who mobbed James Brindley or George Stephenson as they came to survey their parish for canal or railway, and to the modern road ‘nimby’, transport has been keenly political, carrying high economic stakes. Britain's relatively small size and favourable endowment with water transport permitted its pre-railway transport systems to induce intense regional specialization, urbanization, and the economic growth of the first ‘industrial revolution’, where other nations attained merely developed industrial regions without complete social transformation.

Transport too provided for personal travel long before the coming of modern systems. The great pilgrimages developing from the 14th cent., to Canterbury, Walsingham, or even Compostella, crowded the roads and led to the creation of commercial inns. Medieval law implied a fifteen-mile round trip for market day, a near-universal transport experience, and marriage horizons commonly extended beyond the parish boundary, with courtship energetically pursued by foot or horse.

The cheapening effect of successive transport innovations has democratized travel over the very long term, especially train, bus, and motor car, but we must not allow suburban prejudices to blind us to the extent to which their impact was creative. Neither have six centuries of transport change, mass urbanization through migration, and industrialization been sufficient wholly to dissociate surnames from the pays from which they stemmed. By the mid-19th cent. Britain had the transport almost perfectly to integrate its political, economic, urban, and social systems, and yet preserved specificity of place and voice long afterwards. Transport must therefore be seen as a critical contributory factor in the historical process, not a dominant determinant.

J. A. Chartres