The Road

by Hilaire Belloc

i

So far we have been considering the material conditions of the Road: the physical circumstances which determine its trajectory. But these alone do not completely account for its trace in practice or theory. There is another category affecting this, the political or moral category: the various effects of society in modifying what, but for them, would be the formula of least effort. These political causes of modification are of less effect than the physical, but they merit a brief mention.

The political factors modifying the trajectory of a road (that is, the factors due to man’s social action and not to material causes alone) are three in number. Firstly, the factor of cost—which is, the economic tendency to avoid as far as possible the destruction of old economic values in the making of a road; secondly, legal restraints against the Road’s following its line of least resistance; and thirdly, the presence of a variety of objects to be served, which variety again interferes with the simple rule of finding the trajectory of minimum effort.

The first of these political factors, the factor of cost, you find even in the primitive road, which avoids the cultivable land if it can, or crosses it at the narrowest point available, and you find it at the other end of the scale in our complicated modern world, where the Road tends to avoid the destruction of economic values in highly concentrated town life and thus keeps narrow when it is established, and also fails to develop new communications. The effect of this political restraint is constant throughout history, great in all periods, but increasing cumulatively with the increase of wealth and the economic development of society. There follows from this a most interesting historical phenomenon, which I shall deal with at greater length in my second section—“The English Road”—because it would appear to be upon the point of recurring in this island. That phenomenon is the “strangling of communications” in the old age of a wealthy state from the very effect of its wealth. It is a paradox of profound effect which you get over and over again in the history of great mercantile cities: their wealth—which should be their best advantage in developing and changing communication—crystallizes them. Their ways are laid out for a particular phase of traffic. The land on either side of the streets becomes enormously valuable. The traffic changes in character. New ways are demanded by the new conditions, but they are not built because the compensation required for disturbance terrifies the reformer. There follows a phase during which you have heavy congestion of traffic, and then, unless reform comes in time, a succeeding phase of decay.

It is very rare in the history of great urban centres to find the problem tackled at the right moment and solved: to find governors of sufficient daring to take the economic plunge. The Government of Napoleon III did so to some extent in the case of modern Paris (though it left a great number of congested streets unrelieved), and there are not a few modern Italian towns where similar action has had its effect: for instance, Bari. But the general rule in history is that a city having reached its highest point of wealth becomes congested, refuses to accept its only remedy, and passes on from congestion to decay.

How strong the influence is you may observe in one particular historical example where its influence is more clearly discovered than in any other—that is, the example of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666.

Here was the finest opportunity for rebuilding that ever a Government had. It might have done what was done at Turin and laid out a new city altogether. Two men of genius, Sir William Temple and Sir Christopher Wren, produced magnificent plans with broad ways, round places for the crossings, and a carefully thought-out scheme of transverse streets. Vested interest and economic peril proved too strong for them. The city was rebuilt on its old lines with narrow lanes and alleys, courts, tortuous trace, the mark of all which it carries to-day.

There is a good side to this, of course. No one can regret the conservation of tradition. Everyone who knew the old Paris mourned for the antiquity which was swept away under Napoleon III, and even in our slight changes in modern London we are shocked at the desecration they involve. I confess that I myself have never got over the loss of Temple Bar, though I only knew it as a child. If this were the main motive at work one would criticize less strongly the hesitation to make our town streets meet the modern great change. But it is not the main motive. The main motive is a blunder in the science of economics. It is the idea that the destruction of a number of imaginary economic values (“imaginary” because they form no part of the total real wealth of the State), to wit, the urban site values, is in some way an expenditure of real wealth. So far is this from being the case that there is perhaps no example in all history of a congested street-system being reformed without the wealth of the city increasing after the change.

Of the minor political questions which confront us to-day in England this stands in the first rank. If we do not reform our main roads we shall handicap ourselves against our competitors, but if we do not broaden and change our town streets we may rapidly strangle and atrophy our most vital centres of commerce.