ii
We will now follow this development.
[The English Road has a character of its own which clearly differentiates it from the other road systems of Western Europe]. So sharp is the distinction that, since modern travel recovered the use of the road through petrol traffic, the new type of road he discovers is, after the language, the most striking novelty affecting the foreigner on his arrival.
Part II, Sketch I, District of TYPICAL ENGLISH ROAD SYSTEM. Widths exaggerated.
Lower part of Sketch I (Part II), District of TYPICAL FRENCH ROAD SYSTEM. Widths exaggerated. Same scale as above
Abroad, the French model—recovered from the Roman tradition, remodelled in the late seventeenth century, and vastly developed in the nineteenth—has impressed itself everywhere: the Road is there built up on a framework of very broad, straight main ways, carefully graded, proceeding everywhere upon one plan. These are connected by a subsidiary net of country ways less direct and less broad, but all carefully planned and graded, and these in turn by local lanes of all surfaces and gradients and gauges, dependent upon parish rates and betraying by their irregularity their independence of the national system.
Typical English Lane
Here the scheme is contradicted at every point. A long stretch dead straight is very rare: when it is found it is due to some accident of local choice. The surface differs not as between the main road and local road, but indiscriminately: a small parish way will often have a better surface than the main road it joins. The gauge is haphazard: the main road between the capital and some great port will go through the most surprising changes in breadth, here appearing as the narrow high street of a suburb, and there, a few miles on, spreading to 50 feet upon an open heath, then again turning abruptly round the sharp right-angle corners and between the irregular frontages of a village. The English roads are far more numerous, the mileage of good road surface to the hundred square miles far greater, than abroad. Yet not one of them is planned throughout. They all twist, the lesser ones winding perpetually and usually without any reason of their own, compelled to such anomalies by the custom of older paths, by enclosures, by encroachments. For the most part these roads, from the most important to the least, are “blind,” that is, bounded by obstacles which mask the approach of corners and conceal the country on either side: a very pronounced national characteristic, due mainly to the use of hedges upon the more fertile land. The grading is never continuous—the main roads in which this feature has been most thoroughly looked to yet have astonishing exceptions of 1 in 9, 1 in 8. The bridges are of varying strength, half of them bearing warnings that they are dangerous to heavy vehicles.
When we seek the origin of this strange mixture of serviceable and unserviceable in the English road system we discover it in the political history of the country. The English hedged roads yield their more pleasing landscape, they have more length to the square mile than those abroad, they are haphazard in gauge and gradient (only half planned), they have such excellent surface (and that independently of their importance), such a strange assortment of bridges, such abrupt and blind corners—all because the Road, like every other institution, is a function of society, and because English society proceeded on special political lines of its own after the Reformation.
Like the road systems of every other country, that of England arose from the great Roman military ways. It went through exactly the same phases of decline as those of the neighbouring Continent, it had the same new development in the Middle Ages, it ran through open fields mainly. A man put down on an English road of Henry VIII or Elizabeth’s day would have marked no great distinction between its character and those of a Flanders or a Breton or a Provençal road, or the roads of the Rhine.
But with the seventeenth century the profound change which had worked for a hundred years throughout all English life appeared in the Road. The monarchy fell. A national road system became impossible. The local landlords took command of society. The local road was the only basis for development. Commons were enclosed, co-operative village farming gradually disappeared, the hedges everywhere increased in number, cutting up the old open fields. Any extension of communication could only come through the linking up of tortuous village ways.
Then came the industrial revolution, the exploitation of better surface through the turnpike, the epoch of Telford and Macadam. Lastly, the huge increase of the great towns in the middle and later nineteenth century, the coming of the internal combustion engine, and the present crisis. For we have come to a crisis to-day in the history of the English Road. It must be changed—or supplemented—under peril of such congestion as will strangle travel and interchange: that is the interest of the subject to-day.
I propose, therefore, in what follows to consider, first, how this particular character in the English Road developed: what were the agencies which gradually made it so different from the road of the neighbouring Continent: next, to sketch very briefly and only in its bare outline the history of the English Road, and to conclude with an examination of the reforms which we should undertake and the crisis in travel and the use of the Road which has led to that duty.
CHAPTER VIII
THE “BLINDNESS” OF ENGLISH ROADS
The Two Causes Governing the Development of English Roads—Waterways and Domestic Peace: The Relation of the English Road to Military Strategy.