by Tom Fort
As I wandered about poking my nose in here and there, I began to wonder not just about this road but about other roads and roads in general, and our relationship with them, and the place of the motor car in that relationship. It is a truism that we take our cars for granted, and another that we could not imagine life without them. But it could be that we are edging towards a watershed in that relationship.
Since 1945 the car – a vehicle built of steel, powered by petrol, owned by us – has become a dominant influence on the way we live. It has enabled almost all of us to embrace a frantic fluidity of movement that has progressively determined how, mechanically, society should function. Other forms of transport – horse, bike, train, bus – have been unable to stand against it. It made possible the immediate gratification of every fleeting desire to be somewhere else. It put within everyone’s grasp a vision of mobility that abolished constraint and reduced the world into a mesh of manageable journeys. We were all seduced by its central principle: go where you like, when you like, as you like.
Its flaw is that it is fabulously wasteful. It consumes resources of energy, space and time as if they were inexhaustible. They are not. Little by little the vision’s sources of nourishment are beginning to run out. The price of fuel has risen to a point where only the rich and the stupid no longer pause to consider if a journey is worth it. At the same time insurance premiums have been driven up to levels way beyond the means of many recently qualified drivers. The roads remain clogged; journey times rise inexorably.
A new model of mobility is needed. Already in the cities some people are giving up their cars in favour of a rental service available via phone app that enables them to pick up a vehicle when they need it and drop it off when they have finished with it, paying an hourly rate for the use. Far from finding their freedom of movement restricted, they discover that they have rid themselves of a bundle of irritations (breakdowns, punctures, where to park, getting fuel, remembering tax and MOT) not to mention the expense.
The age of the motor car has been with us for little more than half a century, and there is no reason to believe that it will last for ever, any more than did the age of the train or the stagecoach. True, for much of the world it has only just begun and still has its course to run, as the people of emerging economies joyfully embrace its life-enhancing possibilities. But in traffic-strangled western Europe its days are probably numbered. It is no longer feasible to dismiss as a sociologist’s utopian fancy a system of small, plastic mobile pods powered by fuel cells (probably hydrogen), communally owned, with a digital control network determining availability, route, speed and price; a system in which people and businesses will be careful of their mobility allowances.
When the new age comes, its people – the children of our children’s children perhaps – will look back at our system and consider it startlingly wasteful, destructive and crude. It’s a fair bet that they will not be hopping into their micro-cars on a whim and nipping eighty-odd miles down the A303 for an evening’s fishing and eighty miles back again. But there will still – unless we mess everything up – be fishing. And there will be an A303. It will still be assisting tomorrow’s travellers to accommodate the chronic restlessness of the species. It will still enable them to pursue their dreams and to live and relive remembered joys in one way or another.
1
IGNITION ON
The weather might have been kinder for such an auspicious occasion. It was a gusty, rainy September day. The photographs show the worthies of Hampshire in raincoats, umbrellas raised against a leaden sky, hair disarranged by the breeze. They included the chairman of Hampshire County Council, Sir Richard Calthorpe; the chairman of Andover Rural District Council, Mr J. D. Threadgill; the Mayor of Andover, Mrs Anne Thorne, and a gaggle of aldermen and county and borough councillors. They had been summoned to welcome a distinguished guest and to mark a red-letter day in the history of the county and the ancient town of Andover.
In fact the guest was not as distinguished as he should have been. The programme originally submitted to the county council by the Ministry of Transport stated that the Andover bypass would be opened by the minister himself, Rchard Marsh, one of the smoother and more televisual talents in Harold Wilson’s Labour government. But late in the day word came that Mr Marsh was being diverted to the Basingstoke Northern bypass. His place at Andover would be taken by his parliamentary secretary, Bob Brown, a Newcastle MP and former trade union official.
The guests may well have been disappointed by this substitution; may have sniffed somewhat at hearing Mr Brown’s Geordie accent rather than Mr Marsh’s mellifluous Home Counties tones; may have nursed the regret in their hearts – this was Hampshire, after all – that this long-awaited moment should have arrived when a Socialist rather than a Conservative government was in power. Never mind. Mr Brown could cut a ribbon as neatly as anyone else. He could deliver a celebratory speech written by some nameless official without making a fool of himself. He would do. The great matter was the road.
The main photograph in the Andover Advertisers coverage of the day’s events shows Mr Brown with scissors at the ready. The road surface beneath his feet is dark and smooth and slick with rain. The scene revealed in other pictures is one of ruin: a landscape ripped asunder, woods and copses torn up, fields assigned in Domesday devoured, hillsides thrust aside; vast ramparts of soil, stone and chalk heaped up, the countryside violated in the name of progress. In our time we have largely forgotten the brutality of road building. But then it was familiar enough. Then was 1969.
The Times of the next day, Friday 12 September, reported the opening of the £2 million Andover bypass as well as that of the Basingstoke Northern bypass in a single paragraph. The newspaper was more interested that morning in the discussions about mutual tensions and interests between the Russian premier, Mr Kosygin, and the Chinese premier, Chou en Lai. It reported extensively on a wave of industrial unrest in western Europe involving French railwaymen, Italian metal workers and German miners, and on the expulsion of an unruly rabble of hippies from Ibiza. The paper’s education correspondent examined the sagging morale of teachers. The Northern Ireland correspondent analysed an official report laying the blame for Belfast’s incendiary condition on militant supporters of the Reverend Ian Paisley. The Israelis had shot down eleven Egyptian aircraft, and a new constitution for Rhodesia had been published. The Bank of England was concerned about the tightening squeeze on credit. Letter writers were exercised about Britain’s place in the Common Market.
In the Andover Advertiser the bypass was the big story, but not the only one. Andover Ufologists had held a meeting to talk about sightings of ‘moving lights and blurred illuminated objects’ and agreed to hold a further skywatch. Grateley and District Women’s Institute had thanked Mrs Mann for her talk on How To Make a Skirt. Basingstoke Chamber of Commerce was reported as having urged Andoverians to ‘come and shop in the “Space-age Town of the South”’. Members of Andover Borough Council had voted not to wear ceremonial robes for the Battle of Britain service on 21 September – Alderman Porter said there was nothing worse than six people turning up in regalia and the rest not bothering.
If you had cash to spare there were ways to spend it. Pontings of Andover were offering a one-year-old Hillman Minx Estate in white, with fitted wing mirrors, for £700. You could rent an ‘all-channels 19-inch tube TV set’ for forty-six shillings and two pence a month, with a forty-shilling deposit. And on it, the night of the bypass opening, you could have watched Patrick Cargill in Father Dear Father on Thames, followed on BBC 1 by an episode of Dad’s Army entitled ‘The Armoured Might of Corporal Jones’.
It so happened that I got my full driving licence in 1969. At the time our family car was, I think, a Ford Consul, but I have no memory of ever being allowed to drive it. My three elder brothers and I shared the use of the sky-blue Morris Traveller that had been our grandmother’s until she upgraded to a Morris 1100. The Traveller served us well until its rear offside wheel fell of
f while I was driving it through the outskirts of Guildford, inflicting fatal structural damage to the undercarriage. As I had been responsible for putting the wheel on after a puncture repair – apparently with the nuts the wrong way round – I had only myself to blame.
That autumn I went to university, where one of my brothers passed on to me a bulbous, mud-coloured Austin A40 which he had bought from our local garage for £45. It had a bench front seat covered in soft chestnut leather worn and cracked by the many backsides of previous owners and passengers. It had no functioning heater and in cold or damp weather it was necessary to haul the choke out to its full extension of eight or ten inches to have a hope of starting it. The window wipers were very short and moved so slowly that in anything like a downpour it was safer to steer by leaning out of the window, or preferably to stop altogether.
The A40 was followed by a 1959 Austin Cambridge that I bought from the same local garage for £55. In its distant youth this car had had a twin-tone white body with black roof and tail. Over time the black had faded to dingy dark grey, and the white to dirty dishcloth, both extensively blistered and pockmarked by rust. Because it was the first car I had bought for myself I was rather proud of it, but it had many faults. On anything more testing than a 1-in-20 uphill slope the engine would start coughing in a tubercular manner. Genuine hills could be conquered only in first gear, with queuing traffic behind obscured by a trailing cloud of bluish smoke. This condition required regular return visits to the garage for a process known as ‘de-coking’. Each time she would run smoothly for a while. Then the coughing would resume. Gradually the intervals between the treatments became shorter.
The Austin Cambridge came with a starting handle. I doubt if one in a hundred of today’s pampered motorists would be able to recognise one, let alone know what to do with it. Actually my own notion of operating it was hazy. I knew where to insert it, but no one had told me about the dangers of kickback, or that I needed to keep my thumb on the same side as my fingers. By now the health of my car had deteriorated to such a degree that it would start only if pushed. One morning there was no one to help push it, so I resorted to the handle. My fractured wrist was in plaster for fifteen weeks.
Other vehicles came and went in our lives. Our grandmother progressed from a Morris 1100 to a Morris 1300 to a very smart, almost luxurious Vanden Plas 1300 with grey leather seats, soft carpets, and a lacquered walnut dashboard. She was as generous in letting us drive her cars as in everything else. My brother Matthew overturned one of them on a local lane, and her one concern was that he was all right. I skidded in her Vanden Plas when taking a bend far too fast and shot backwards into a field, puncturing both back tyres, and she did not even rebuke me for my recklessness.
The brother who had passed the Austin A40 on to me acquired a Morris Minor which he was very taken with, until one day he lifted the carpet on the driver’s side and saw the road underneath. My eldest brother had a Humber Super Snipe (I liked the name but the machine was not to be relied on) and subsequently a Vauxhall Cresta with gears on the steering column (vulgar but excitingly powerful). For the family car we had the Ford Consul, followed by various Cortinas, then a horribly ponderous Morris Oxford.
The feature common to all these cars was that they were British. They were made by British workers in British factories owned by British companies (Ford UK had been here so long it felt British). In 1968 British Leyland produced a million cars, and the ad campaigns of that year had a pleasingly home-grown flavour. ‘Great cars don’t happen overnight’ was the slogan for the ever-popular Morris 1300. The Triumph TR6 offered the thrill of its ‘long, power-breathing nose’, its petrol injection, its ‘body-hugging bucket seats’. The admen at MG were inspired to free verse: ‘One day/ when time has clipped/your sports car wings/when all the proud cars of your years/line up to take the chequered flag of memory/you will remember how you caught/the sunrise/rode the misty wings of morning/in your MGB GT’.
There were ominous signs, though. 1969 saw the launch in Britain of the Honda 1300, the Datsun Sunny, and the Toyota Corolla, heralding the Japanese invasion of our car market. At the mighty Longbridge car plant on the outskirts of Birmingham – the heart and lungs of British Leyland – a Communist shop steward called Derek Robinson was deploying his menacing, monotonous Midlands voice to take control of the works committee, thereby sowing the seeds of the industrial conflict that, a decade later, would make Red Robbo a leading hate figure for the right-wing media and Conservative establishment.
For the moment, however, a roll call of familiar names still gave the British car market its distinctively and comfortably British complexion. There were new or newish models to draw the gaze of the rapidly expanding army of car buyers – Wolseley (the 18/85), Riley (the Kestrel), Hillman (the Husky), Singer (the Gazelle), Sunbeam (the Rapier), Rover (the 3500), Humber (the Sceptre) – as well as the various Morrises, Austins, Triumphs and Vauxhalls, the exciting new Ford Capri, and the darling Mini. We thought British and we bought British. And – as the opening of the Andover bypass illustrated – the experience of driving British was expanding fast.
‘Every new mile of highway brings a warm glow even to a Transport Minister’s heart,’ Mr Brown told his damp, windswept audience as they stood beside Andover’s Picket Twenty interchange. The minister’s heart must have been unusually suffused with heat that September day. Not only had Richard Marsh himself opened the Basingstoke Northern bypass and Bob Brown the Andover bypass, but twelve miles further west the chairman of Wiltshire County Council, Sir Henry Langton, was declaring the Amesbury bypass open, offering the hope that the people of Amesbury would at last be able to enjoy a decent night’s sleep.
It’s likely that Richard Marsh’s inner warmth was short-lived, as within a few weeks of that happy day he was sacked from the government for daring to oppose In Place of Strife, Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle’s ill-fated plan for bringing the obstreperous unions to heel. But for the great majority of the citizens of Andover and Amesbury the comfort was huge and permanent. Andover in particular had acquired the reputation over the previous decade of being one of the most hellish traffic bottlenecks in the country. Queues several miles long were standard at holiday times, as up to 20,000 vehicles a day tried to fight their way through the twisting streets of the town centre. At night the houses along Bridge Street and London Road shuddered in a fog of diesel fumes as a procession of trucks ground past.
‘You cannot expect diamonds the size of bricks,’ Mr Brown said later in his speech. The meaning of this cryptic metaphor seems to have been that the £2 million spent on Andover might seem modest, even insignificant, in the context of an annual road-building budget of £300 million – but that schemes like this added up. What the country was finally getting, Mr Brown boasted, was the ‘sophisticated road network’ it needed and deserved – and all thanks to the wisdom and ambition of a Labour government. At last a vision was being realised.
We had always lagged behind our continental competitors in this great endeavour. In Germany the first autobahns had been constructed, as ordered by Hitler, at incredible speed, ‘as flawless and powerful as National Socialism itself, in the words of one evangelist. Italy had its first autostrada even earlier, while in France the network of autoroutes had been spreading steadily during the 1950s. But in Britain the fine words had never – until comparatively recently – been matched by fine deeds.
As long ago as 1903 a Conservative MP, John Scott Montagu, had proposed a motorway between London and Birmingham. In 1905 Scott – by then Lord Montagu of Beaulieu – set forth this vision: ‘Large towns will have special arterial routes. There will be but little noise, no smell, no dust. No bacteria will breed in fermenting horse-manure, and the water-cart will be unknown. Europe will become for the motorist one vast holiday area. The country with the best roads will become more and more prosperous. Roads will be justly regarded as the necessary hallmark of civilisation.’
Autocar’s blueprint for the way ahead
Little by little the pressure increased. Much of it took the form of a growing clamour from the swelling ranks of middle-class car owners sick of traffic jams and crawling along narrow, winding roads dating back to the turnpike era. At the same time a new generation of road builders, led by Lancashire’s forceful county surveyor, James Drake, at last managed to get the attention of ministers and their officials. The builders argued that without a network of fast dual-carriageway roads, Britain would be unable to retain its place at the top table of world economic powers. The equations were simple enough. The car industry was vital to the economy and would become more so. Greater prosperity would mean more people buying more cars. Everyone wanted to go somewhere, but they must be able to get there.