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Joe Moran

On Roads Hardcover – January 1, 2009

by Joe Moran (Author)

4.3 61 ratings

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In this history of roads and what they have meant to the people who have driven them, one of Britain's favorite cultural historians reveals how a relatively simple road system turned into a maze-like pattern of roundabouts, flyovers, clover-leafs and spaghetti junctions. Using a unique blend of travel writing, anthropology, history and social observation, he explores how Britain's roads have their roots in unexpected places. He visits the Roman role in the way our roads are numbered, the ancient sat-nav systems of China of 2600BC and the unknown demonstrations against by-passes in the 1920s, and ends up at the roots of today's arguments about road pricing and road rage. Full of quirky nuggets of history, "On Roads" also celebrates the often overlooked people whose work we take for granted, such as Percy Shaw, the inventor of the catseye, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, the designers of the road sign system, and Charles Forte, the entrepreneur behind the service station. These stories of our past shed light on hidden changes in our society, the relation between people and nature and the invisibility of the mundane. And - on subjects ranging from speed limits to driving on the left, and the 'non-places' where we stop to the unwritten laws of traffic jams - they have never been told together, until now.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Profile Books
Publication date

January 1, 2009
Dimensions

5.67 x 1.26 x 8.74 inches
ISBN-10

1846680522
ISBN-13

978-1846680526
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Profile Books (January 1, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1846680522
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1846680526
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.12 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.67 x 1.26 x 8.74 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #703,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,134 in Historical Study (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.3 61 ratings

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John the Reader

Slow Down!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 2, 2012

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If you find it a little strange that a History Professor from Liverpool would write an entire book on the subject of the British Motorway, you'll find it even stranger - should you pick up a copy - that you cannot stop reading it! Joe Moran also wrote another highly regarded book on the subject up Queuing (lining up) for Beginners and is a Cultural Historian, who, says Robert Macfarlane in "The Guardian" takes subjects that should not be really be interesting and makes them so. I found myself endlessly quoting snippets and facts from this work ... I am sure my wife could write a review of this fascinating book, even though she did not actually read it.

Using the advent of the first Motorway, built just after WWII, Moran introduces the concepts of planning, forecasting, logistics and politics of road building and attendant "Black Arts" of costing (and budget overruns of course), the necessary size, color and background of lettered signs to enable them to be read at safe distances at high speeds and the revolution of changing from roman capital lettering to computer generated sans serif signage.

Quoting Betjeman and Paul Theroux the author lays out the story of development protests, tree-housing squatters and `tree huggers', and early examples of `occupying' by indignant local populations demonstrating against - and sometimes even for - the new road that they wanted built in somebody else's backyard.

A history of the palimpsest nature of roads, rarely truly `new' in Britain's cluttered history, from Romans through Napoleon to the "Iron Lady", Margaret Thatcher and the series of beleaguered Ministers of Transport the human side of the road story is fascinating reading.

One person found this helpful

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saskatoonguy

A social history of the British motorway

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 23, 2009

This book is of the genre that takes some physical feature of everyday life and subjects it to academic scrutiny. Motorways (on this side of the Atlantic, expressways or interstates) are a staple of daily life that we rarely think about. Much of Moran's book focuses on motorway service areas, which in Britain have restaurants and (occasionally) motels. There's no counterpart to this in the US or Canada, except along toll highways like the Pennsylvania Turnpike or Ohio Turnpike. Even along US toll highways, there's nothing quite as grandiose as the 65-foot-tall Forton Service Area, shown in one of the book's few photographs.

This book roams across innumerable road-related topics and is filled with scattered insights; for example, the author notes that criticism of service area eateries is grounded in class-based elitism, coming from people who rarely experience working-class food. Moran points out that for those whose basis of comparison is the local cafe or workplace cafeteria, the food at service plazas is quite acceptable. Or, how many Brits are aware of the origins of the road numbering system? (You mean there's actually a pattern?) The author also discusses how the notion of speed limits have evolved over time, and in a parallel manner, how attitudes toward speeding and law-breaking on highways have evolved over time. He has a keen eye for hypocrisy on the Left. For example, he notes the irony of people driving their cars to a meeting to protest a new highway, or how Liberal prime ministers have pursued Thatcher's road-building program, albeit cloaked behind progressive-sounding rhetoric.

Moran's greatest contribution is in emphasizing how ephemeral the criteria are by which we judge artificial changes to the landscape. Motorways were once regarded as objects of beauty that symbolized hope for the future, but now they are seen as scars on the countryside. It is quite possible, Moran argues, that motorways will once again be viewed as historical artifacts to be loved. Much the same has occurred to railways, as Moran points out -- once reviled for ruining the countryside, now associated with environmentalism and historical charm. Society's sense of what is aesthetically pleasing changes with each generation, and similarly, each generation has things it hyperventilates about. For example, it's hard to believe that when automobiles first became common, one of the biggest complaints was the ugliness of petrol pumps. To the people of 2020 or 2030, our current aesthetic values may appear equally out of date. After all, it wasn't that long ago that people regarded brutalist modern architecture, with its massive concrete slabs, as beautiful.

4 people found this helpful

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Rob Sawyer

King of the road

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 4, 2010

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I gave 'Queuing for beginners' five stars and thoroughly recommend it. When I happened upon this Joe Moran offering I thought I had to read it and bought it in the same batch as 'Map Addict' by Mike Parker.

I started reading it and initially wasn't that impressed thinking 'I am reading a book about roads here'!! However my initial dislike quickly disappeared and I ended up finding this to be simply excellent. True it does tend to major on motorways and large trunk roads but the detail and the research and the fact that Joe Moran has put it together in an entertaining and readable way deserve praise.

There is much in here that was close to my heart, I live near the Twyford Gap, I was born a year after the Preston Bypass was opened, I remember Swampy, so not only was it an excellent history of roads in the UK, it was quite 'local' for me.

Moran's writing style is informative and clearly well researched, I don't agree with the reviewer who implies it is just one reference after another. I thought that was one of the main plus points of the book that Moran was able to draw on a huge amount of information and filter it into an edible format.

It was interesting that there was some crossover between this and 'Map Addict' (obvious I suppose) but there the similarity ends and Mike Parker would do well to learn from Joe Moran's objective non personal style (well less personal than Parker!).

A fascinating, interesting history and social comment on our roads - who would have thought a book about roads could be this interesting, perhaps he'll write one on Quality Assurance next!

3 people found this helpful

ceriithomas

A roadmap of social history

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 1, 2010

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Moran views roads not simply as transport routes, but as a focus for charting social history. Over the last century, roads have formed the battleground between safety lobbies and individualists, between conservationists seeking to protect town and country against development, and between the conflicts of individual versus mass transport.

Abundant examples illustrate these themes. The AA was founded to warn of speed patrols; the last Lord to be tried by his peers was acquitted on a driving charge; the first service stations acquired cult status; mild protests since the 1930s evolved into the embittered battles of Newbury and Twyford Down.

Moran notes that recent Governments have dropped the fanfare expansionism of Macmillan and Thatcher for a more subtle piecemeal approach. As transport policy has matured, so too has the anti-road lobby. He concludes that we neither adore roads nor hate them; we have simply learnt to live with them.

Despite the specialist subject, this is not just for transport enthusiasts. Readers of social history will find plenty to interest them too.

WALSHY

'On Roads' Joe Morab

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 27, 2010

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As someone living on Teesside a big irony is that the one single thing that put us well and truly on the world map - the opening of the world's first proper passenger railway from Darlington to Stockton - has been honored by Stockton Council in such a positively perverse fashion. Where others would have built a replica station or set up a new railway museum, the civic elders of Stockton decided to name a new piece of very boring urban dual tarmac running along the alignment of that old railway `1825 Way'.

This sums up the contradiction in British culture when it comes to transport. We all love our railways, but not to the extent of using them all that often. You can see this in any good public library where there will be racks full of erudite volumes about past and present railways, but (apart from highway atlases) nothing on the roads we use every day.

This oddity has now been redressed. Joe Moran's book `On Roads' celebrating what Moran calls "the most commonly viewed and least contemplated landscape in Britain" is now out

The job he sets in this book is a new one. It is to make us look afresh at modern life on our roads, and to appreciate their hidden history and their oddities.

I need to say immediately that Moran steers clear of both highway pre-history and our residential and town centre roads, which he sees as owing more to the surrounding urban surroundings, instead preferring to concentrate on the development of our main inter-urban roads over the last century or so.

He also digs deeper than just looking at the development of the tarmac forming a waffle iron pattern across our land. He looks, for example, at issues like the evolution of British highway signs and their lettering designs, something, which he demonstrates, has helped form typography across almost all other forms of public signage (including across our railway network and our airports)

He also shows how our inner selves have come to terms with the design and content of roads and of the vehicles that use them, whether that be the evolution of car design, or the artful civil engineers use of the "clothoid curve" (the graceful cornering arc, with slowly increasing curvature, but which also require motorists to concentrate as they turn).

It isn't just aesthetics. He brings us to earth with a bump (and I apologise for that term) when he starts to discuss the masculine love of speed and the deaths and carnage that brings in its wake. He evokes the essential gloominess of such things as underpasses Travelodges, petrol stations and road-kill.

He is good to, on the hidden geography of such places as the Watford Gap, the Hanger Lane Gyratory, the Redditch Cloverleaf , the Gravelly Hill Interchange (Spaghetti Junction to you and I) and the Almondsbury Four-Level Stack, places which are both well-known to millions but at the same time as remote as the far side of the moon in terms of any knowledge of the ground they stand on.

What Moran manages above all is to reclaim the road as a country of its own: a terrain as mysterious and worthy of exploration and study as an upland stretch of moor or small but dense copse.. He argues that mu"The land surrounding rural motorways is ... vast and unknown", he notes in one section. "If you are ever on the run from the law, I would strongly recommend that you hide in the wooded motorway verges of our oldest motorways, like the M1 or M6. There is just enough room for a tent in the half-century of undergrowth, and you could surely live like Stig of the Dump, undisturbed for months or years, in this uninhabited wilderness just a cone's throw from the road."

True, very true, and I write this as my TV is telling me that the trial of a murderer of a women whose body lay undisturbed just 50 yards from a junction on the M5 will be starting soon.

David Walsh

8 people found this helpful

Somerset Lady

A delight, but only dealing with post-motorway period

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 16, 2016

Verified Purchase

This is a delightful book. It is not what I thought I was buying, but I read on regardless because it is whimsical and beautifully written. Curl up and enjoy it for what (p.15) it states itself to be
"This book is not a complete history of the road... it deals with the period from the birth of the first motor-ways..."
Shame this wasn't made plainer in blurb - but then I would have dismissed it and not experienced its pleasures.

I remain on my hunt for a history of roads...

3 people found this helpful

Gareth Williams

Interesting stuff

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 11, 2014

Verified Purchase

I enjoyed this book, and am amazed at the seemingly random and obscure facts that Joe Moran introduces into the text. It is a real quarry for anoraks and provides all sorts of detail about Britain's roads, especially since the start of the motorway era. If there's a weakness it is that the logic of the argument is obscure - why are sections of chapters lumped together, and wqhat is the overall thrust of the book? Having said that, as long as you're not looking for a sequential history or travelogue, it's a good read and you'll never travel the motorwaay system again without appreciating all that concrete!

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