LIFE ON THE ROAD

Following the trail of exhaust fumes, cruising around the highways of the New Towns.

The private motor car in 1960s Britain. An absolutely ideal, aspirational indicator of prosperity and freedom. Speeding down broad highways, the American dream imported to British reality. This was a golden age, before contemporary revelations of environmental impact, traffic jams and fuel prices.

Dr Beeching was busy pushing us off the railways and the new town planners were driving us into the future. Everything would be easier, faster and more fun. Hard to resist, isn’t it.

Cutting along a roadside footpath feels laborious, traffic roaring past on a section of road I know takes 2 minutes to drive and, so far, 20 minutes to walk. It’s a trudge along a neat stripe of smooth black path, white-lined delicately for cycles and feet. There’s nature here buffering up alongside me, green borders that fringe the route on either side, screening us aurally and visually from what lies beyond. It’s a classic new town tactic, keep the roads fast and keep them away from the rest. Avenues of speed that carry you through and away. After a mile and a half I’m used to sharing this route but when we duck under the motorway bridge that intersects with this dual carriageway the reverberations feel jet engine loud.

What’s not immediately clear when traversing these spiders legs is where exactly they could be taking you, it’d be easy enough to fade onto a diversionary route, existing in the system forever, crossing intersections and getting back up to speed. Keep turning left and you might never leave. Losing your bearings after a thousand oak trees in the borders. Until, you look for something different, any identifying feature that might help establish a sense of place. Attempts have been made, an industrial relic or a sculptural monolith placed on a roundabout, as if they’ve always been there.

The zones of the town are intentionally divided and then re-linked by these shimmering roadways slinking and grooving their way along, making quick progress, at least until the next traffic light, stopping all the fun. The curves are mainly here by design, to make things more attractive, form over function. A luxury by modern standards of budget-conscious civil engineering.

In amongst the executive saloons and practical estates are the curtain sided lorries, navigating their way steadily from industrial park to motorway junction, seamlessly passing through town without disturbing the residents, via a lunchtime lay-by and a sizzling bacon sandwich on thick bread, brown sauce hitting their knee. I go for sausage, egg and bacon with ketchup, when in Rome, after all. By design everywhere is 10-15 minutes from everywhere else, the perk of fast travel and short commutes, no excuse for being late and little incentive to travel any other way.

But how to keep these corridors of speed running smoothly? It simply doesn’t get better than The humble roundabout.

The roundabout is a democracy, a piece of ingenuous design, allowing for the weaving and diving and merging of traffic, a system in which everyone gets their turn. Give way and blend together. On foot it’s less clear how to navigate, a subway somewhere below, if you take the right path, or a quick dash across the multi-lane entrance and exit.

New towns became famous for their roundabouts, part of the concrete reputation. The jokes soon followed… They say that when the planners laid out the new town road system they were working into the night and getting through copious amounts of coffee. Wherever a ring from the bottom of a cup was left on the blueprint, the workers built a roundabout.

The first UK roundabout is to be found nestled amongst the leafy streets of Letchworth Garden City, Ebenezer Howard’s proudest moment and one of the towns that preceded the new town movement.

Early new town arrivals tell stories of roads to nowhere, stretches that went so far and stopped, skidding into the gravel and dirt of the next development site. Gradually the gaps were filled, junctions added, car ownership almost a necessity, to cope with underwhelming public transport.

Connecting these new town networks to the expanding motorways of Britain would be more of a challenge. Once development strayed outside of the designated development zones the problems grew. Building utopia within your own town limits is one thing, convincing the outside world, quite another. The 17.5 mile section of M54 motorway linking Telford New Town and the M6 would cause one of the biggest planning controversies ever witnessed in Shropshire. Costs tripled to more than £60 million and thousands of people would protest against the plans.

Salop Council, rather bizarrely, worried that the motorway would make things too easy for homesick ex-Birmingham residents to return to their roots. This essential road was considered an eyesore and a disaster for those living on the route. To keep the peace 250,000 trees were planted and 15 miles of hedgerow planted. The road would be cut in below ground level wherever possible.

No matter the challenges, the new town planners knew that a motorway link was everything and made it happen.

‘The continual delays have been an embarrassment…. Telford is already a good place in which to do business, live and to work. But I see the M54 as the starting point for a new boom period.’

Lord Northfield, Telford Development Corporation Chairman

By the 1980s Telford had its motorway link. Together with it’s inner ring roads, byways and highways Telford had developed a road network to be proud of. The car would continue to be king. Embracing the future in the past means living with the future in the present.