A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  Terrains were also altered by human action. Rivers were deepened and straightened, a process seen from the eighteenth century, and coastlines were altered. More dramatically, escarpments were cleft to provide routes for motorways, notably the M40 through the Chilterns at Stokenchurch and the M3 through St Catherine’s Hill near Winchester. Estuaries such as the Hull and Severn (twice) were bridged; and islands were linked to the mainland, with both the Skye road bridge and the Channel Tunnel. The latter compromised Britain’s status as an island.

  More generally, economic growth, greater affluence and a greater number of people put pressure on the environment. More waste and pollution resulted from these developments. Coastal waters were heavily polluted by sewerage outflows, while industrial pollution was responsible for acid rain, which damaged some of the country’s woodland, and hit both rivers and lakes. Increased use of water carried forward the long-established practice of drowning valleys, especially in the Pennines and Wales, for reservoirs. Newcastle was served from the very large Kielder Reservoir on the north Tyne, completed at a cost of £150 million in 1982 and filled in 1983.

  More material goods meant a greater use of energy, despite marked increases in energy efficiency. As a result, larger amounts of carbon dioxide were dispersed into the atmosphere above Britain, while the supply of sufficient electricity and other power sources became a serious issue. Furthermore, the consumer society produced greater and greater quantities of rubbish, much of it non-biodegradable and some of it toxic. Babies’ nappies were no longer cleaned by immersion in boiling water; instead, disposable nappies became a major component of rubbish.

  Rubbish disposal increasingly became a problem for both local government and business, not least due to greater public sensitivity about the means and location of dumping, and about the supposed dangers arising from incineration. Both proved a classic issue of NIMBYism, as ‘Not in My Back Yard’ seemed a routine response to pressures for development.

  In addition, noise and light pollution became issues and, in fact, more serious and widespread. Maps of both indicated their spread, and quiet, in particular, became a rarer quantity, in rural as well as in urban areas.

  These environmental pressures stemmed from significant changes in national life. In particular, the unprecedented rise in average real earnings – by over two and a half times between 1945 and 1995 – had a serious impact on the environment. For example, the percentage of households with a washing-machine rose from 66 in 1972 to 88 in 1991, and this led to increased use of water as well as fewer laundrettes. Advertisements for washing powder, another environmental problem, played a major role on television.

  While one set of environmental pressures related to the strains posed to the environment by human activity, another was posed by the availability of the resources necessary for this activity. The two were closely related, notably with the water supply, as the pressures of greater use hit water levels and underlying aquifers. Power supply is another major problem, and one greatly exacerbated by environmental concerns and NIMBYism.

  The crisis also owes much to a failure to maintain adequate investment in infrastructure, a failure that contrasts not only with the Victorian investment in railways and sewers and the inter-war investment in electricity capacity and roads, but also with post-1945 investment in nuclear power stations, motorways and the infrastructure for natural gas. From the 1970s there was insufficient investment, due, in part, to economic downturns but also to the emphasis on personal consumerism and to state expenditure on social welfare. A reliance on market solutions was also a cause of problems, not least because the regulatory framework (for both prices and environmental impact) limited market factors and discouraged investment, while the necessity in such cases for returns largely in the long term was not generally welcome to investors who did not wish to wait a long time.

  The net effect was that power stations were not built to keep up with estimated peak demand, and, moreover, were not built to take note of the obsolescence of existing power plants. In particular, there has been a failure to build new nuclear reactors, despite the degree to which they do not use up fossil fuels, while coal-power stations, which in 2008 supplied 31 per cent of British electricity, are hit by European Union rules on emissions. Moreover, promised national cuts in carbon emissions, to 80 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050, pose a real challenge to keeping the lights on. Confidence in renewables, notably offshore wind turbines but also tidal power and solar heating, plays a major role in government planning, but these face difficulties in provision (for example the effectiveness of wind turbines on calm days) and in attracting the necessary investment.

  In 2008, the largest source of electricity supply (46 per cent) was natural gas, but there are problems in ensuring a stable supply. North Sea gas supplies peaked in 1999 and have fallen rapidly since. As a result, reliance on gas means exposure to the political interests of Russia, Europe’s main supplier.

  Energy supply thus brought issues of environmentalism, consumer interest and government policy into conflict. The policy from Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979–90) on was a liberal one of encouraging free market competition by private companies to provide investment and capacity, but that does not seem to have worked. In the winter of 2005–6, there were shortages of natural gas, leading to short-term working by factories and to threats to the domestic network, and in 2008 power station failures led to extensive blackouts due to a lack of sufficient spare capacity. These issues scarcely feature in conventional histories of Britain, but they are of importance, not least because the provision of infrastructure is significant to the relationship between different generations.

  Transport

  The car provides a key instance of the environmental pressures stemming from greater use. The number of cars, 110,000 in 1919, had risen to nearly 2 million by September 1938, by which time there were also 500,000 road goods vehicles and 53,000 buses and coaches. By 1939, estimated annual expenditure on private road transport was £135 million. Motoring was encouraged by a fall in its cost, especially in the 1930s when cars became cheaper in real terms.

  Moreover, the rise in motor transport was also supported by government policy, with far more money being put into developing the road system than was being spent on the rail infrastructure. The government built roads but did not help the railways. In addition, the government insisted that the rail companies had to publish freight rates, which meant that the road hauliers could undercut them. The rail companies also could not refuse to carry uneconomic freight, whereas the road hauliers could.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, arterial roads were constructed, for example the Great West Road in London and the East Lancashire Road. The Trunk Roads Programme was devised in 1929, both to provide employment and to ensure that road improvement schemes were pressed forward. Central government agreed to provide much of the cost. Although there was no centralized planning or overruling of local views and property rights akin to that of the German autobahns in the 1930s, and, indeed, no motorways, nevertheless, from the 1930s, trunk roads with dual carriageways became more common and new arterial roads, such as the Southend Arterial Road, proved effective long-distance routes. What was then the longest underwater tunnel in the world, the road link under the Mersey between Liverpool and Birkenhead, opened in 1934. Major road bridges, such as the Tyne Bridge between Newcastle and Gateshead (1928), matched earlier railway bridges which had been among the most dramatic engineering achievements of the Victorian age. Within towns, the role of road transport was seen as the more flexible buses competed actively with trams.

  The new roads led to new smells and sounds, and affected the visual context of life, both in towns and in the countryside. Roads created new demands for road signs, lamp posts, manhole covers and traffic lights, as well as for the large ‘road houses’ (service stations) where motorists could obtain refreshments and petrol. A world of services grew up around the car, and this world was a changing one. Thus, the maps and guides produced for motorist
s in the 1930s, for example the Shell Guides, were eventually replaced by satnav systems, with location-finding and route-planning handled in a very different fashion.

  Roads led to new boundaries and commands, to zebra crossings and belisha beacons, the latter named after a Minister of Transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha (1893–1957). His period in office (1934–7) also saw the introduction of driving tests, urban speed limits and one-way systems. Nowadays, we are well aware of the damage and disruption brought by road transport, not least the resulting pollution; but, for much of the century, the freedom offered made cars seductive. In the inter-war years, those who could not afford cars were in the overwhelming majority, but vehicle ownership became a goal or model for many, creating a pent-up aspiration and ensuring that future affluence would lead to the purchase of motor cars.

  This concern for affluence helped account for many features of 1930s society, culture and politics, not least support for the National Government that came to power in 1931, but also contributed to a restlessness with existing arrangements. This restlessness has attracted less scholarly attention than subsequent wartime (1939–45) desires for a fairer society, but the desire for more material goods and for a sense of possession and for possessions was one reason why Labour proved unable to sustain its post-1945 hold on office and why, instead, the Conservatives held power from 1951 to 1964.

  The cinema helped to foster this romance with cars and other possessions: films, both the British ones and their influential American counterparts, created and disseminated lifestyles and images. Enormous cinemas, such as the vast Ritz at Gosport, made going to the films more glamorous. The cinema had become more popular with the middle class from the late 1920s, and this was linked to investment in these large and luxurious cinemas, especially in middle-class suburbs. Aside from acting as foci within towns, cinemas also gave a new vitality to the appeal of towns to their rural hinterlands. Country dwellers went to urban cinemas, such as the Grand in Banbury, to see the wider world, both through films and in news reels. Films also played a social role that was subsequently to be taken by television, but with important differences: the cinema was a communal experience, whereas the television was a family one. By 1934, there was one cinema seat for every ten people in South Wales, although this ratio can be seen as an index of how dreadful life outside the cinema was.

  After a fall in car ownership during the Second World War, when national and personal resources were perforce concentrated on war, its rise accelerated rapidly, especially after petrol rationing ended in 1950. Private car ownership rose from 1.49 million in 1945 to 3 million in 1960 and 12.7 million in 1970. Private road transport shot up from 47 million miles (76 million kilometres) in 1954 to 217 million miles (350 million kilometres) in 1974, and an increase from 39 to 79 per cent of the total passenger journeys covered. This gain was made at the expense of bus, coach and rail transport. The percentage of goods traffic moved by road rose from 37 in 1952 to 58.3 in 1964 as lorries benefited from the programme of major road-building. A motorway system was created, beginning with the M6 Preston bypass, opened in 1958. The M1 was punched through the Midlands from Watford to Birmingham in 1959. Motorway bridges were opened across the Severn in 1966 and 1997.

  The impact of the car on the country included more atmospheric pollution due to vehicle exhausts, as well as the destruction and blight linked to road-building. The structure of city life changed, not least because of this destruction brought by road-building, while roads became barriers within townscapes. The devastation was covered by the novelist P.D. James (1920–) in her novel A Certain Justice (1997), which describes the building in the late 1960s of Westway, the elevated section of dual carriageway that carries traffic on the A40 closer to central London:

  Westway had been a comfortable enclave of the respective, reliable, law-abiding lower middle class who owned their houses and took a pride in clean lace curtains and carefully tended front gardens … Soon there would be nothing but tarmac and the ceaseless roar and screech of traffic thundering westward out of London.

  Similarly, Wolverhampton’s ring road was opened in stages between 1961 and 1986, clearing away established landmarks and residential districts, while Carlisle’s, opened in 1974, cut the castle off from the city and was followed by the replacement of a long-established area by a shopping centre. Multi-storey car parks came to disfigure many townscapes from the 1960s, including those of historic towns such as Bath, Durham, Exeter and Newcastle.

  The abrupt change in the landscape was shown with the building of motorways past historic buildings. The M1 speeds past Hardwick Hall and the M54 past Moseley Old Hall. The M4 was driven through the Osterley estate in west London in 1965, the M5 through the Killerton estate, and the six-lane Plympton bypass was cut through the park at Saltram in 1970, largely obliterating the eighteenth-century carriage drive. Conversely, pressure for bypasses grew and the towns that gained them, for example Honiton in 1966 and Ashburton in 1974, became more attractive places to live.

  There were also changes in transport in the cities, where trams were replaced by diesel-engined buses. Many cities, including Glasgow, Leeds and Liverpool, were still investing strongly in tram systems in the late 1940s, but in the 1950s they were swiftly discarded. Newcastle’s last tram ran in 1950 and London’s in 1952, and by 1960 the sole surviving electric tramway in England was essentially a tourist attraction between Blackpool and Fleetwood. Aberdeen’s last trams ran in 1958, and by 1962 even the extensive Glasgow system, the last in Scotland, had ceased. London’s last trolley-bus followed in 1962, and, in 1963, Newcastle Corporation decided to replace trolley-buses by motor buses. The price of electricity and the maintenance cost of the wires hit trolley-buses, while motor buses benefited from greater manoeuvrability and low petrol prices. These changes in transport meant different daily sights and sounds for millions, both travellers and others, and were important to the altering fabric of life.

  Meanwhile, the pace of car use increased, whichever criteria were employed, with car ownership rising from 224 per 1,000 people in 1971 to 380 per 1,000 in 1994. Commuting by car increased while the motorways became a network. Greater personal mobility for the bulk, but by no means all, of the population enabled and was a necessary consequence of lower-density housing, different employment patterns, and declining subsidies for public transport.

  There were links between rising car use and significant changes in society, not least commercial development in the shape of out-of-town shopping centres and business parks. In addition, the percentage of people walking or travelling by bus fell markedly, an aspect of the declining use of ‘public space’. This was also linked to an increase in obesity and unfitness among children, an increase that gave rise to belated public concern and governmental action in the 2000s as the public health consequences of this were more fully appreciated. Moreover, the use of cars interacted with fears about children being out by themselves. Nevertheless, cars were a democratizing mechanism, making work and leisure more accessible, indeed one of the most democratic elements in twentieth-century Britain.

  Greater mobility for most, but not all, of the population, however, exacerbated social segregation. Car ownership brought a sense, maybe an illusion, of freedom, and an access to opportunities and options for many, but not all. The division of the population into communities defined by differing levels of wealth, expectations, opportunity and age was scarcely novel, but it became more apparent and pronounced during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and an obvious aspect of what was termed the underclass, in both town and countryside, was their relative lack of mobility.

  Consumerism and Environmental Change

  Consumerism focused not only on mobility, but also on leisure, comfort, and the automatic and instant availability of the heat, water and food that previous generations had found difficult to obtain and ensure. Environmental pressure was an obvious result. Had the population remained at, say, 46 million, then each individual could have increased his ‘carbon footprin
t’ without the impact on the environment of the present-day 61 million. Thus, population increase is the prime factor in Britain’s environmental crisis, a point that public debate tends to avoid. Moreover, the effect of overcrowding on the quality of life is considerable. Demand on water supplies stemmed not only from the rising population, but also from greater comfort and wealth in the shape of more frequent baths or showers, and a greater ownership of dishwashers and washing-machines. Other trends contributed to the same result. More cars meant more car washes, while a greater interest in leisure led to more effort being devoted to gardening, another call on water supplies, a trend encouraged by television programmes on the subject in the 2000s. Fashions were also significant, notably that in the 2000s for garden ‘water features’, generally man-made ponds and springs powered by electric motors.

  The problems created by far larger quantities of rubbish are a pointed and less attractive consequence of the rise of consumerism and of population numbers. Home ownership also played a major role in consumerism. Whereas, in 1914, some 10 per cent of the English housing stock was owner-occupied, by 2000 the percentage was 70, and of a far larger stock. A key decade was the 1980s, when the Thatcher government sold, rather than built, council houses and also encouraged the ready availability of credit for mortgages. In Scotland, where wage levels are lower and the control by local authorities stronger, the percentage of owner-occupied houses is smaller. Ownership was linked to expenditure on decoration and furnishing, with owner-occupiers spending far more than those who rent.

  By the 2000s, environmental concerns became more prominent as a result of global warming. Anxiety about major changes in climate and, through the melting of the ice caps, about a significant rise in sea levels, affected both public debate and governmental policy, and Britain played a major role in the negotiations leading to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the 2009 Copenhagen conference, as well as in the development of carbon trading. Rising sea levels are a particular threat to Britain, an island, and notably so in southern and eastern England.