by Tom Fort
On 28 July 1829, at 4 a.m. Gurney, accompanied by two assistants, steered the steam-carriage out of the yard of the Cranford Bridge Inn on the western fringe of London and onto the road that led to Bath. His brother Thomas, two more engineers, and two of the backers sat in the passenger vehicle. Two horse-drawn conveyances were in the little convoy: one a phaeton carrying Hanning and the other chief investor, Sir Charles Dance, the other loaded with extra fuel. Initially the horses forged ahead while the engine puffed and clanked, but well before Maidenhead was reached, steam had amply demonstrated its superiority over horse muscle. At a steady 14 m.p.h. Gurney’s creation powered its way triumphantly to Bath, its progress interrupted only by an encounter with a pile of bricks near Longford and by a rowdy demonstration from a drink-inflamed mob in Melksham, during which a stoker was knocked unconscious and the inventor himself was wounded in the head by a flying flint.
The word spread, and on the return journey enthusiastic crowds turned out to get a glimpse of the thundering iron beast. The townsfolk of Reading were so impressed that the mayor put on a civic reception. Back in London, Gurney and his backers glowed in anticipation of the triumphs to come. Hanning ordered eight of the steam-carriages for a new Exeter–London service, upping his overall investment to £10,000. Sir Charles Dance bought three at £800 each and began a four-times-a-day service between Cheltenham and Gloucester. The stagecoach proprietors began to be alarmed and – assisted by turnpike operators and corrupt magistrates – decided that Gurney’s great venture represented a serious threat to their comfortable monopolies.
They paid for a layer of loose gravel a foot thick to be deposited on the Cheltenham–Gloucester road, into which the steam-carriage’s wheels sank, bringing it to a halt. At about the same time new tolls were introduced: two pounds for a steam-carriage, four shillings for a stagecoach. Gurney and his sponsors raged and ranted against this blatant act of protectionist trickery. After a leisurely investigation a parliamentary committee agreed with them, but took no action to rectify the injustice. Gurney was financially cleaned out, and turned his fertile mind to other projects.23 As for William Hanning, he died in 1834, his dream of watching his own steam-powered carriages passing his gates on his road still unfulfilled.
But the road proved its worth. The coaching companies on the Exeter run began to switch to it because it was shorter and quicker. The Subscription – known affectionately as the Scrippy – began using the New Direct Road in 1819. In 1831 a race was arranged between it and its rival, the Defiance, which ended in a virtual dead heat after covering the 170 miles in thirteen hours. The deaths of several of the horses from exhaustion was considered a price well worth paying.
In 1835 Mrs Nelson, the formidable landlady of the Bull in Whitechapel, established a daily service featuring the Exeter Telegraph. It left Piccadilly at 5.30 each morning ‘to the cries of Jewboys selling oranges and cedar pencils at six pence a dozen’, as Anthony Trollope’s elder brother Thomas recalled. There was twenty minutes for breakfast at Bagshot, thirty minutes for dinner at the Deptford Inn at Wylye. It reached Exeter at 10.30 p.m., a journey time of seventeen hours. In response to the success of the Telegraph, William Chaplin put his Quicksilver on the New Direct Road. It left St Martin-le-Grand at 8 p.m., reached Andover at 2.30 a.m., Amesbury at 3.39 a.m., Ilchester at 7.50 a.m., Honiton at 11 a.m., and Exeter at 12.34 p.m. From there it proceeded to Devonport, reached in an overall time of 21 hours 15 minutes, with 23 changes of horse.
‘The Telegraph’, proclaimed an advertisement placed in the Plymouth and Devenport Herald on 12 January 1839, ‘is admitted to be the most punctual coach with regard to time in all England’. Nothing would stop it, not even the memorable snowstorm of 27 December 1836, when the coachman – having reached Amesbury through the blizzard – resisted all entreaties to give up, had fresh horses harnessed, and battled on through the drifts up Thruxton Hill to Andover. Thomas Trollope described in his autobiography (rather prosaically called What I Remember) a furious pace between Ilminster and Ilchester: ‘four miles in twenty minutes and a trace broken and mended without any interruption – the performance was the ne plus ultra of coach-travelling.’
But the heyday was short-lived. The railway reached Exeter in 1845, cutting the journey time from London to eight hours. Some coaching towns became railway towns; others – like Amesbury – returned to their slumbers. Many of the coaching inns closed. Coachmen, ostlers, grooms and stableboys were laid off. The turnpikes fell into disrepair and their trusts were wound up. Funds for maintaining the roads dried up. Half a century after the Telegraph and the Quicksilver had made their final runs, William Hanning’s New Direct Road was described in a gazeteer as ‘a rough green track strewn with flints . . . cyclists are advised to ride in the grass margins.’
* * *
Ilminster is a rather pleasant town which would be even more pleasant had not the elected representatives of the people seen fit to allow Tesco to deposit a spectacularly ugly supermarket in its centre. It stands not far from the market square where poor Charles Speke swung at the end of a rope: a hulking square block faced in pale, liverish brick with a layer of red brick at ground level. A white awning supported on tubular steel hangs over the entrance, which is reached through what the design brochure calls ‘a landscaped courtyard’ – in reality a paved thoroughfare to the car park with the public lavatories, in matching sickly yellow brick, on the other side. Over the doors is the Tesco banner in red and blue showing a pound being snipped with a pair of scissors, with the legend ‘Every Little Helps’. There is another banner on the wall: ‘From schools to charities we work with our community to support local causes – EVERY LITTLE HELPS’. A few yards away a flight of steps leads to the spanking-new premises of the Ilminster Bowling and Tennis Club, overlooking emerald rectangles of turf as smooth and flat as billiard cloths.
The saga of how Tesco got the store that Tesco wanted convulsed the town and filled the pages of the local paper, the Chard and Ilminster News. It was also chronicled by a well-known journalist and part-time Ilminster resident, Rosie Boycott. Ms Boycott had a weekend home on the Dillington estate and for a time ran a smallholding there. She produced two books about her endeavours, which – as can happen when they arise from virtuous intentions and complete absence of experience – went sour over time. She eventually abandoned her efforts to make a going concern of her vegetables, chickens and Gloucester Old Spot pigs, took a £200,000 hit (painful details shared with readers of the Daily Mail) and got a new job as advisor on sustainable food to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.
Ms Boycott had some harsh words for Ilminster’s councillors, and harsher ones still for the supermarket leviathan itself. The councillors may have smarted, but Tesco hardly blinked. It deployed its proven strategy of combining blandishments with veiled threats, and routed its opponents. When Somerset District Council dared to object to a proposal to shift the position of the store and to alter aspects of its hideous design, its members received a letter warning them that continued refusal would place them ‘in a vulnerable position’, and that they would lose any resulting planning appeal. At the same time the bowling and tennis club were offered facilities beyond their wildest imaginings. A colony of slow-worms was tenderly removed from the site and found a quieter home elsewhere. In November 2007 the store opened. ‘We are determined to be good neighbours,’ a Tesco spokesman said.
More than four years on it has become just another part of the town, and the story is over. Rather like a new road, it has lost its ability to shock and outrage. The people of Ilminster have learned to use it, and no longer recoil from its remarkable unloveliness. It may well be that the dire predictions of local shopkeepers about the impact on their trade were unfounded. Ilminster still has a butcher’s, a greengrocer’s, a wine merchant and two delicatessens, which is not bad in these desperate times. The weekly market survives somehow and there is even a draper’s, and you don’t see many of them today. The town also boasts a theatre (the Warehouse, sho
wing A Day in the Death of Joe Egg when I passed through) and a church which our friend Edward Hutton considered ‘as noble and glorious a building as is to be found in Somerset’. ‘A man born within sight of such a thing,’ Hutton mused, ‘may consider himself fortunate if, in his last hours, he may see it again.’ As a fleeting visitor, I can testify that the beauty of the Church of Our Lady, Ilminster, certainly counterbalances the barbarism of Tesco – without, unfortunately, being able to cancel it altogether.
Ilminster Church
Those turnpikers of old knew a thing or two. Their business model was simplicity itself. They put up the money to make the road usable, and auctioned the right to collect the tolls to a third party. The third party hired the pikemen to collect the money, and fitted them out in their high glazed hats, corduroy breeches, white aprons and white stockings. The road users paid according to distance and mode of travel. It was not cheap – an inside seat on the Telegraph between Exeter and London in 1832 cost three pounds ten shillings, rather more than the equivalent first-class rail fare today. The system was far from perfect. It offered plentiful opportunity for dodgy dealing, and – unlike the railways when they came – it rarely produced a decent return for investors. But at least the principle behind it was clear and comprehensible to all: that the consumer pays for what is consumed.
Then the state took over, and that link was broken. During the first age of the automobile, the state funded a halting expansion of the road network from general tax revenues. Motorists paid taxes for their motoring, but there was no direct correlation between those proceeds and expenditure. As the car habit took ever deeper hold, governments came to rely upon progressive increases in the duty on fuel to pay for things that had nothing to do with transport. The motorist became a revenue milch cow, to be appeased by regular additions to the nexus of motorways and upgradings of other major roads.
The first age of motoring ended around 2000. By then it had become apparent that no government could afford to maintain its unspoken contract with the motorist. Car use had risen to a level far beyond the capacity of the road system to deal with it. At the same time the potential for increasing that capacity had almost been used up. There was no uncontentious space left for roads; and anyway the hostility to the principle of building them had become too great for a democratically elected administration to overcome or circumvent. Furthermore the financial cost was beyond bearing.
But the motorist was still being bled, and was becoming restive. In 2000 the simmering sense of grievance among road users boiled over into a series of protests by lorry drivers and farmers. They blockaded fuel depots and blocked roads, causing the more excitable commentators to forecast economic paralysis around the corner. The duty on petrol had risen to 80 per cent of its total cost, making it the most expensive in Europe. At the same time the programme for providing new roads was grinding to a halt. Alarmed as much by the bellows of outrage from the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph as by the bolshiness of the hauliers, Tony Blair froze the tax element of the cost of petrol and ordered a review of the long-term future of road transport.
This was carried out by a committee chaired by the economist and government advisor, Sir Christopher Foster, under the aegis of the research arm of the Royal Automobile Club. The results were published two years later under the title Motoring Towards 2050. Blair himself contributed a preface in which he called the document a ‘valuable contribution to the debate’ – a debate which, he said, he was looking forward to hearing (meaning, ‘no action then, not in my time’).
Much of Motoring Towards 2050 consists of sober forecasts: road traffic to rise by a half if capacity is increased so that congestion remains at present levels, by a third if not; journey times to rise by a fifth; and so on. No government, the report says, ever keeps promises to expand the road network. To keep congestion at current levels would require spending at four or five times the level proposed in Labour’s (subsequently abandoned) Ten Year Plan. Improved management – measures like variable speed limits, narrower lanes, reserving lanes for cars with two or more occupants – might give a 10 to 15 per cent increase in capacity.
Sir Christopher Foster and his colleagues were clearly confident that they saw into the heart and mind of the British motorist. The value we place on the freedom given us by the car is very deeply rooted, they noted. What matters to us is where we live, and we do not care how far we have to travel to get to work, nor – by extension – how long we have to spend in our cars to get there. Fortunately the waiting will be made more bearable by the car of the future, a steel or aluminium cage covered in a lightweight skin of aluminium or plastic, powered by hydrogen fuel cell, which will largely drive itself in the infrequent intervals between queuing. This will leave those inside free to take advantage of multi-media facilities – or perhaps to read Autocar or to go to sleep. Even so, the gradual annexation of more and more of our hours of consciousness by our enslavement to our cars will cause resentment and unrest.
There is only one answer: more road. New roads, wider roads, parallel roads, roads in tunnels, roads on stilts above other roads. The starting point for the wise men of the RAC – doing nothing, they said, ‘has nothing to recommend it’ – was Labour’s Ten Year Plan, which proposed thirty new bypasses, eighty £5 million-plus schemes, two hundred smaller projects, and the spending of £30 billion on the backlog of maintenance. This, they judged, would be insufficient to contain congestion at current levels. The alternative – defined as ‘high provision’ – would see all ‘strategic’ roads widened, new roads in tunnels provided where necessary, and motorway capacity more than doubled. The cost: £30 billion a year.
At this point I think we can bid farewell to the RAC panel of experts, just as they take their leave of the firm ground of reality to float skywards in pursuit of their asphalt Utopia. To be fair to them, their brief was not to account for taxpayers’ money and balance the demands of the health budget against the defence budget, but to dream the dream. Nevertheless the melancholy truth is that their efforts were wasted. The report was redundant even as it was published. Labour’s Ten Year Plan – which the experts regarded as inadequate – was jettisoned because everything in it was turning out to cost twice as much as forecast. Given the present condition of the public finances, it does not require a supercharged intelligence to work out that investment on the scale envisaged in Motoring Towards 2050 is not going to happen.
So what will? If the RAC panel are right, and car use and ownership simply continue on their upward path, paralysis beckons. If our enslavement is unbreakable, the time is not far off when commuters will hardly have time to get home from work before they have to leave again. They may be right – certainly thus far there is not much sign of the general sense of grievance at traffic jams translating into behavioural change, nor of the cost of motoring deterring people from doing it.
In a book called After The Car, two sociologists, Kingsley Dennis and John Urry, argue that the car system has reached a point of ‘self-organised criticality’ and is ‘ripe for tipping’. They look ahead to a world in which mobility is organised for us, where ‘software will become as crucial as physical capacity’. They present three models for the future direction of human society. In one we retreat into local self-sustaining cells where homes, workplaces, schools and sources of food are close together, and from which we would rarely need to depart. Another is what they call ‘regional warlordism’, where global connections are broken down, nation states crumble, tribes compete for energy sources, and long-distance travel ceases because it is too dangerous. The third envisages ‘digital networks of control’ in which software systems determine how and when people move around. Travel is in small, light, self-driven pods; people are allocated carbon allowances, and physical travel is increasingly replaced by ‘virtual’ travel.
Is it possible that we can think more carefully about when and where we drive? Such a giant shift would almost certainly require coercive as well as persuasive measures. But coercion is
already woven into the fabric of our driving. We are coerced into wearing seatbelts, stopping at traffic lights, observing speed limits, parking in prescribed places. The ‘freedom’ of the car is a self-evident fraud. The RAC, the AA, the roads lobby, the car lobby, Mondeo Man, Jeremy Clarkson, the opinion-grinders at the Daily Mail – they would have us believe that to restrict our use of our car is to assault a fundamental human right – tantamount to restricting the amount of fresh air we breathe or the amount of nonsense we may talk. Why? Why is using the road any different from helping yourself to any other commodity. You help yourself, and when the supply is exhausted the commodity is no longer available.
Or perhaps I am missing some profound philosophical absolute. It’s happened before.
* * *
Apart from a half-mile section bypassing the village of Marsh, the A303 beyond Ilminster follows the same line that it did in the turnpike era, and is generally not much wider. Its eighteenth-century character acts as a mildly sardonic commentary on the ambitions of a past generation of road-builders, as well as on the wilder fantasies of Motoring Towards 2050. In the grand plan, this should have been exalted into a big, wide, fast superhighway to Honiton and beyond. Instead it is no different from any other unimproved, meandering country A-road – except that it is expected to deal with a volume of traffic that at busy times is way beyond its modest capacity.
The Ilminster bypass peters out at Horton. The road narrows and becomes more winding as it climbs into the Blackdown Hills. The countryside is lovely. It rises and falls in a green sea of rounded ridges and wooded vales. Little streams twist and turn along the creases. The soil is loam and clay, overlaid with rich pasture broken into irregular fields by tidy hedgerows. In most of the grazing fields at least one mature oak has been left, presumably to give the animals shade on hot days. The effect is very pleasing.