The Joy of Motoring

'There will be rain, but it should be drier and brighter to follow.'

'Radio 4 with Evan Davis and James Naughtie, 27 minutes to nine

-'is the time, and here's Rory with the news.'

-This is awful.

I hate traffic, I hate commuting and I hate other drivers,

but I love cars, I love driving,

and I love what motoring was first supposed to be -

freedom, speed and the allure of the open road.

This film is the story of what's gone wrong with motoring,

an all too human tale of how individual desire

has been transformed into mass misery.

How we go from heaven to hell in 100 years behind the wheel.

The liberation for all promised by the motorcar

ends up with traffic jams for everyone.

We go from the thrill, the excitement,

the wonder of the journey...

to the awful, miserable grind of the daily commute and school run.

As a historian, I'm fascinated by the social history of motoring.

How, in the 20th century, it transformed our lives.

But I'm also intrigued by the car, an obsession that goes back

to my earliest memories of sitting in the back

on the shiny hot rubber seats of my parents' Renault 12,

and then to my first car - an Escort, naturally.

So, in making this film,

I've seized the chance to drive some truly classic cars.

A mighty Daimler,

a couple of Bullnose Morrises...

a heaving Ford Zodiac...

..and a sleek Austin Healey. In order to explore

how the cars which promised us so much pleasure

have driven us instead into gridlock.

The story of British motoring

begins, in fact, with a French car - the 1904 De Dion Model Q.

It has a single-cylinder six horsepower engine

and was one of the most popular cars when the history of motoring began.

It's easy to start, there's a technique to it.

You've got to be careful with it.

When you grab the starting handle,

you make sure your thumb is on that side of the handle, OK?

Cos if you've got it on that side, if it does backfire,

-there's a chance that it would break your thumb.

-Ah!

If you're lucky, OK? If you're unlucky,

it'll take the handle right out of your hand, bring it back

and smack you on the back of the wrist.

That'll probably break your arm.

This car has claimed seven people's arms

-since I've been looking after it.

-Right, that's quite a tally.

Yeah, it is. So you've got to treat it with a bit of respect.

-Respect, yeah.

-Don't be frightened of it.

-No.

-So long as everything's in the right position...

-It should be all right.

It's easy to forget what a novelty the car was

when it was first introduced,

and what a privilege it was to own what was,

at first, little more than a sophisticated toy.

The first age of motoring really

kicks off in the late 1890s, up to the First World War.

The car in this period was in many ways an extension

of the class hierarchy of Victorian Edwardian Britain.

It was limited to the wealthy, the aristocrats

and royalty, both in Britain and abroad. King Edward

was a great motorist who apparently absolutely hated being overtaken.

He was introduced to the car by the leading motoring aristocrat

of the period, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.

So this was a vehicle of leisure, of exclusiveness,

which came with all the attributes of class in many ways.

You'd have to have an engineer with you to help drive it.

You'd later have chauffeurs, people to polish it.

So the car was not yet this symbol of access, of democracy.

It was particular to the upper echelons of British society.

There are these excitable accounts in 1905 of bright young things

heading out of Oxford to explore the countryside

around them in open top motorcars.

Roaring through the Cotswolds

and over the South Downs, dominating the roads

with scant regard for anyone who might fall in their way.

"The upland air was exhilarating, the sensation of those who travelled

"was of gliding through space,

"and it was impossible to resist the instinctive tendency

"to sing inarticulate songs

"as an expression of the sheer joy of living in such surroundings.

"The more one thinks of that afternoon's drive

"and of the innocent pleasure resulting from it,

"the more plain it is - what a boon the motorcar,

"used intelligently, is capable of being."

The car's takeover of the countryside

soon found its way into literature, most famously in

Kenneth Grahame's children's story, the Wind In The Willows.

First published in 1908,

the same year Henry Ford produced his popular Model T Ford,

the principal character, Toad of Toad Hall,

"neglects all gentlemanly etiquette and good manners,

"so obsessed is he with the novelty,

"the glamour and above all the speed of early motoring."

Toad is, on the face of it, a very unattractive figure.

Incredibly selfish, self-regarding,

drives through the countryside without any care for anyone,

steals cars, jumps on passions, enthusiasms, and then jumps off.

Yet we're strangely attracted to this figure,

as are all his friends, and they don't quite know why.

Even at his most self-regarding and self-pitying,

poor Toad, we love him in a strange sense.

"It was on them.

"The poop-poop rang with a brazen shout in their ears

"and the magnificent motor-car,

"immense, breath-snatching, passionate,

"with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel,

"possessed all the speed of earth and air for the fraction of a second,

"flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped

"them utterly and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance."

If you think right back to the 1830s and these concerns

about people's heads flying off if they took a railway,

and then you think of the 1900s, of the individual speed

at which people could go in their own cars,

and they weren't limited by any railways.

They could go where they liked in their own car,

as fast as the car could carry them.

There was no traffic to get in the way.

There was the old cart and horse, the odd caravan

which could be shunted off to the side with a poop-poop.

It was the individual liberation,

the hedonism of speed which Toad symbolised.

But Toad wasn't the only driver on the road.

The 100,000 drivers of 1919 had risen to two million by 1939.

And most of them were using their cars to explore

the towns and villages of England that couldn't be reached by rail.

The most popular work of travel literature in the 1930s

was HV Morton's In Search Of England.

Morton was a travel writer, journalist,

an author with an abiding love of England.

And if in the 19th century the working classes had discovered

the English seaside through the railway, in the inter-war years,

the middle classes discovered the hidden heart of England

through the motorcar, and Morton was their guide.

His work celebrated the civic fabric, the churches,

the village greens, the pubs, the architecture of England.

In their tens of thousands, the middle classes

came to places like this, Beaulieu Abbey in the south of England,

to try and connect, in an age of modernity and change,

with the essence of England.

What Morton's books offered was more than simple tourism,

it was the chance to discover a more historic sense of nationality.

"Never before have so many people been searching for England.

"The remarkable system of motor coach services

"which now penetrate every part of the country

"has thrown open to ordinary people regions,

"which even after the coming of the railways,

"were remote and inaccessible.

"The popularity of the cheap motorcar

"is also greatly responsible for this long overdue interest

"in English history, antiquities and topography.

"More people than in any previous generation

"are seeing the real countryside for the first time."

This is the Morris Cowley, more widely known as the Bullnose Morris,

the most popular car in Britain in the 1920s and '30s.

Deliberately aimed at the mass market, it cost around £200

and came with its own ammeter, speedometer and electric horn.

Top speed, 50 miles an hour.

This drives a lot easier than the De Dion. It's very hot, though.

You feel the heat from the engine really rising up,

you think it's going to go on fire fairly soon,

but the steering is not bad, if not quite power-steering.

You do feel, certainly, more in control,

but you are always fearful of it boiling over.

HV Morton had his own Bullnose Morris

which he gave the nickname, "Maude".

There was this love affair between him and the car,

and then beyond that, him and England,

exploring England through the Bullnose Morris.

This idea of England rushing through his hair,

whilst seeing it all around him.

There's a lovely moment in In Search Of England

when HV Morton gets up early,

roars up from Salisbury to Stonehenge, before dawn has broken.

He gets out of his car and walks here to the inner circle,

and tries to connect this historic icon

with a renewed idea of national sensibility.

What he found here amongst these stones lying here

for thousands of years was an essential idea of Englishness.

"The wind whistles mournfully between the monoliths,

"and the sheep crop the grass on the ancient barrows

"which lie in the shadow of the dead temple.

"The sun rose.

"A thin streamer of pink light lay across the East.

"The stones were jet black against the sky.

"The grey clouds that had so recently moved across the stars

"now caught fire and became gold arrows in the heavens.

"The light grew second by second.

"The pink turned to a dull red, then to mauve,

"a veritable furnace of light blazed up above it.

"And in the midst of this, the sun came up over Salisbury Plain."

In the early days, of course, you could just drive up to Stonehenge,

park your car, get out, walk amongst the stones,

even carve your initials onto some of them.

But by the time HV Morton was writing about Stonehenge

in the 1930s, there was an increasing fear

about the effect of the motorcar on the historic fabric.

With the car came cafes, kiosks, even a bungalow was built here.

And you begin to get the origins of this fascinating debate

about the car and heritage.

On the one hand, opening it up for the people,

allowing them to experience this past which only elites used to,

and on the other hand, the effect of the car, undermining the mystery,

the solitude of great spaces like this.

The first car park was built in 1935.

In 1963, the turf and topsoil had been so eroded by visitors

that it was replaced by clinker from the Melksham gas works.

New visitor facilities were built in 1968 and a tunnel

was dug under the A344, because the ever-increasing

volume of traffic made it dangerous for tourists even to cross the road.

In finding England, motorists began to discover

that they were also losing England at the same time.

Today the issue of cars and Stonehenge

remains horribly unresolved.

Behind me is the busy A303, roaring down to the West Country.

If people want to see Stonehenge now,

they do it at 60 miles an hour without stopping.

Those who do stop and gawp

often come to a very sticky end on a busy A road.

# The water is wide

# I cannot get o'er... #

But the allure of iconic landmarks such as Stonehenge remains

at the heart of the motorist's exploration of England

in the early 20th century.

# O give me a boat

# That will carry two

# And both shall row

# My love and I. #

What developed in the 1930s through the middle-class motoring culture

was a romantic gaze of the English countryside.

Those weekend touring parties' trips to ruined abbeys,

stately homes and picturesque villages

produced an idea of deep England,

of southern England which proved enormously influential.

# O down in the meadows the other day

# A-gathering flowers both fine and gay. #

The extraordinary thing about the 1930s' self-exploration

of Britain was what a very divided country it threw up.

On the one hand you had George Orwell,

searching for Wigan Pier

and charting the collapse of the industrial North

during the Depression, and on the other hand,

you had the motoring middle classes in their Bullnose Morris,

scooting around Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire,

enjoying Stonehenge, Beaulieu.

They were scared of the industrial revolution,

places like Manchester, Liverpool, the Black Country.

They sought in these villages a pre-industrial past.

They sold themselves an idea of modern England

based upon a very green and very pleasant land.

It was this idea of England

that became fixed in the national consciousness.

An idea inspired by the motorcar

that would be able to withstand any attack.

When, during the early 1940s,

in the midst of World War Two, Whitehall officials

and defence propagandists tried to build

a sense of national morale, to generate

an idea of what Britain was fighting for.

The images they chose

were not those areas that were actually delivering the war effort -

Clyde side, the Liverpool docks, the Manchester factories.

No, the image of England they chose was something like this -

a Cotswold village with a river running through it.

"Filling the air, peace broods above our fields,

"tempers the wind that stirs the frightened elm,

"fashions the landscape, mellows while it shields

"Its native genius shapes this ordered realm,

"Then done, draw peace of purpose from the earth,

"Look up, and lo, peace from the sky descending

"And think to prove how much this bounty's worth,

"How nearly came the state of peace to ending."

The writer who really teased out this idea of two Englands,

north and south, was JB Priestley.

Better known today probably as a playwright,

in the 1930s he was an author, a polemicist, a journalist.

In 1933, he set out on what he called his English Journey.

He hired himself a Daimler, not dissimilar to this one,

and headed out on the open road.

What Priestley unpicked was what he called the three Englands.

The first England was the real, enduring England,

the England of the southern countryside,

which went back into the mists of time.

The second England was the England of the industrial revolution,

which had made his home town of Bradford.

But the third England was the most interesting one.

The England he saw growing up around him in the 1930s,

an England based on America, of by-passes,

of Woolworths, of vulgarity, and of democracy in many ways.

And Priestley both admired the energy of this England,

and was upset by the ugliness of it.

# A people are just like an automobile

# They'll run fine when everything's right... #

Priestley's journey through England took him up from Southampton

via Bristol and Swindon,

and up through the Cotswolds,

until he reached a town that seemed to prove his point exactly.

# And maybe a break in the testing will prove

# They never were built to endure... #

In Coventry, Priestley thought he'd found his three Englands

in one city.

First of all, the real, enduring England of medieval Coventry,

of Lady Godiva, and Tudor-beamed houses.

Secondly, the industrial revolution Coventry of the 19th century,

of sewing machines and bicycle firms.

Then finally, the Coventry of the 1930s,

the Coventry of the motorcar and of modern life.

One city, three Englands.

But it was the modern England that most intrigued Priestley,

a writer who in 1933 didn't even need to take a driving test.

HORN BLARES

You're undertaking me, you...!

Priestley saw this New England

as being fast-changing and unpredictable.

It was more American than European

and the production of the automobile was at its heart.

When Priestley came to Coventry in the 1930s, this was motor city,

the hub of motor manufacturing in the Midlands.

After the delights of the Cotswolds, Priestley took the opportunity

to see where his own beloved Daimler was made.

He visited here, the Daimler works in the middle of Coventry.

"The modern motorcar represents an astonishing feat of human ingenuity.

"Consider the number of them out on the roads

"and the extraordinarily few accidents due

"to any fault in the vehicle itself.

"If we were one half so clever in the matters that lie far above machinery

"as we are about machinery itself,

"what people we should be and what a world we should leave our children.

"If life were only an internal combustion engine."

But during the Second World War,

the centre of Coventry was changed beyond recognition.

On the night of 14th November, 1940,

the ancient heart of Coventry was put to the torch.

A German bombing raid of over 400 bombers

dropped 30,000 bombs and over 500 tons of high explosives.

The real, enduring Coventry was destroyed for ever.

It would be easy to blame the Luftwaffe

for making Coventry such a vision of tomorrow.

But even before World War Two broke out,

the local authority and city planners

were ripping out the medieval heart of Coventry for new roads.

The city architect, Donald Gibson,

even called the bombing raid a blessing in disguise.

"The Jerries have cleared out the core of the city, a chaotic mess,

"and now we can start anew," he said.

Coventry could see an opportunity to reconstruct

with ideas that planners and architects had had beforehand.

And within 10 weeks we were in London presenting to the minister

the proposals for rebuilding the city

on modern and visionary lines.

This was to be a city in which the car now came first.

Ancient, higgledy-piggledy streets were ripped out.

Ring roads led to A roads, which eventually led to motorways,

and the entire city became a monument to modernist architecture

and the demands of the automobile.

It was a brave new world for a brave new Britain,

and optimism was almost everywhere.

I think that they've made a very good job of rebuilding the city

and I think it will be very good when it's completed.

Now there's new shops opening every day

and it's rather exciting to walk round.

I've seen all the changes

and I don't think you can find a better city in the country.

When it's all completed it will be a marvellous place.

The mess it was in, they'd got to do something, hadn't they?

Of course this is what's happened.

All square walls, no architecture,

just square walls, square windows.

Everything square.

While the people of Coventry were celebrating their shopping centres,

others began to worry about the devastating physical cost

of the car, not only on our cities and town centres,

but also on the newly-beloved English countryside.

What the car opened up was the epic postwar battle

between individualism and the state, freedom and control.

Increasingly, it was felt that landscapes like this

needed to be protected from the ravages of car culture,

the by-passes, garages, bungalows.

Whereas once the car opened up the countryside,

now conservationists tried to protect it.

The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947

and 1955 Green Belt Circular

was a concerted attempt to protect England's country

from the ravages of the car.

When you're standing in the sound of water,

you get a sense you are in a place secluded from the outer world,

so that the place becomes a sort of shrine.

At the same time, popular rural tourist sites -

places like the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales,

were turned into National Parks.

The 1945 Attlee Government, packed with ramblers, cyclists and hikers,

handed over the countryside to the people.

Tourists were encouraged to leave their vehicles behind.

As a result, car parks sprang up all over the country

on the perimeter of beauty spots.

This is Bourton-on-the-Water,

revered as an undiscovered part of England by JB Priestley...

..now dominated by an enormous coach and car park.

In fact, the only place in Bourton without a car is the model village.

# Moonshine, waiting for a love that never comes... #

The rise of the car proved unstoppable.

Having your own motor became as much of an Englishman's right

as owning a home.

Previously, the car had been the province of the elite,

a fashion accessory.

Now it became a democratic necessity.

By 1960, almost one in three households had a car.

With mass production came mass ownership.

In the postwar prosperity, as new designs, styles and makes

came off the production line,

alongside the growth of TV advertising

and, crucially, hire purchase agreements,

ownership of a car became the ultimate status symbol.

'This is a closer look at the superbly-styled new Zodiac.

'Long, low, elegant.'

Vehicles like this, the Ford Zodiac, designed and built at Dagenham,

became moving symbols of modernity,

bridging the gap between jazz and rock'n'roll.

# All of my love All of my kissing

# You don't know what you've been a-missing

-# Oh, boy

-Oh, boy

-# When you're with me, oh, boy

-Oh, boy

# The world can see... #

It looks like a big, American car, trundling along.

Very wide.

But it's very smooth.

Once you're going it really just pelts along.

You don't want to do three-point turns in her.

And it's not best suited to country lanes, either.

But it does let you feel a bit like Mr Toad when you're driving.

# I'm gonna meet my baby tonight

# All my life, I've been a-waiting, Tonight there'll be no hesitating

# Oh, boy When you're with me, oh, boy

# Oh, boy, I want the world to see That you were meant for me... #

'The Zodiac was one of the most popular cars

'in the newly-affluent postwar Britain'

whose Prime Minister told his people they had never had it so good -

Harold Macmillan.

'A large crowd, of course, waited in Downing Street.

'Who would be the new occupant of Number 10?'

Macmillan was delighted with the effects of car ownership.

He said, "I usually drive down to Sussex on Saturday mornings,

"but I find my car in a line of family cars

"filled with fathers, mothers, children, uncles, aunts,

"all making their way to the seaside."

"From Whitechapel and Poplar, from Tottenham and Clapton,

"they pour down Eastern Avenue, 2,800 cars going by every hour."

"10 years ago most of them would not have had cars.

"They would have spent their weekends in their back streets

"and would have seen the seaside, if at all, only once a year.

"Now I look forward to the time, not far away,

"when those cars will be a little larger,

"a little more comfortable,

"and all of them will be carrying on their roofs, boats,

"the main joy at the seaside."

# Val-de ra-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha Val-de-ree, Val-de-ra

# My knapsack on my back

# I love to wander by the stream that dances in the sun... #

Mass ownership of the motorcar

transformed the British holiday experience.

Liberated from the railway,

car owners could go anywhere at any time.

But the greatest symbol of this freedom,

the ultimate white good of the 1960s, was the caravan.

# If you go down in the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise

# If you go down in the woods today, you'd better go in disguise

# For every bear that ever there was... #

Just for adults!

Love it.

# Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic... #

In 1955, 2 million Britons took their holiday by caravan.

By the late 1960s, this had risen to 4.5 million.

This is Somers Wood caravan park, between Birmingham and Coventry.

I think that's a bit of a myth these days.

Angela Fowler showed me round.

-You've met a lot of caravanners.

-Yes.

What is the allure of caravanning for them?

Is it the freedom, the sociability, as it was for you?

I think it's literally them being able to travel away on holiday,

but have everything around them that's theirs.

Just giving them the freedom

that if they do want to decide on a Friday evening

to bob off somewhere at the weekend,

everything's there on board. They can hook up and go.

So it's a very easy way?

A very easy way, really, of being on holiday.

Of course, now I wanted to see

what the caravanning life was really like,

and Sue Watson let me have a quick look.

That's right, we're well sealed in.

Well-insulated. Do come in.

Hey, here we are.

Welcome to our home, which we're very proud of.

It's got everything you could want.

We don't rough it these days in caravanning.

Look at this fridge! Amazing.

Fridge, freezer, microwave on this side. A comfortable lounge.

This makes up into an extra bed.

-OK...

-It all pulls out.

Look at this entertainment complex.

Yes, TV. The satellite ready so we can pick up BBC Four.

This isn't getting back to nature, this is modernism.

No, sometimes you just need to relax a bit.

When your friends have gone home and you're trying to sober up, you can watch TV.

And the cooking facilities?

-Do you want to have a go?

-The old days of the barbecue outside...

We've got that too.

If the weather's like this, it's good to have an option.

We've got the three gas burners

and I'll get the frying pan out for you in a minute.

The other great advantage of the caravan

was that now you could eat how, when and where you liked.

The growth of motoring holidays in the 1960s and 1970s

transformed the eating and leisure experience of millions.

What the caravan holiday signalled

was a death knell of the traditional B&B

and the old meal structures of the boarding house.

-# There's a tiny house

-There's a tiny house

-# By a tiny stream

-By a tiny stream

-# Where a lovely lass

-Where a lovely lass

-# Had a lovely dream

-Had a lovely dream... #

And if you wanted something more permanent than a caravan

and you had the money, then a holiday home was the answer.

Driving a car meant that the dream of owning your own

stretch of the seaside, however small, could become a reality.

-# She was out one day

-She was out one day... #

Where once the car sanctioned the hallowed idea of deep England,

a conservative, unchanging landscape,

now it gave rise to an exuberant, disordered,

non-conformist landscape, of plot lands and prefabs.

-# She was out one day

-She was out one day... #

Here in Jayworth on the east coast of England,

the London and Essex working class began to build hundreds of shacks

and cottages, and the street names bear witness

to the importance of the cars that brought them here.

The Hillman Imp, the Talbot Tourer...

..The Morris Minor.

# In Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen By The Sea... #

One of the many attractions of motoring was its sociability.

And just as caravanners got together and enjoyed group family holidays,

so motoring enthusiasts formed car clubs where they could meet

and exchange tips and information about their vehicles.

Mark is a member of a club

devoted to a car that was first produced in 1963 - the Rover P6.

The club is a family-oriented thing.

Children get their hands on spanners. We promote children getting involved.

A bit of oil never hurt anybody.

A bit of knowledge definitely didn't hurt anybody.

Do you think that's been lost in the young generation,

the sort of...mechanical knowledge or willingness to get involved?

Yeah, I mean, the mechanical knowledge is disappearing.

But at the same time, modern cars don't allow you to play with them.

You've got to plug it into a computer to find out what's wrong with it.

Most of the parts are throwaway,

so you just take them off and replace them with a new part.

These older cars, especially this,

every panel on the outside unbolts and you can replace it.

-Customisable, as well.

-You can customise them, yes!

Within the club, if you wanted to customise your P6 - fine, we love it.

Everybody to their own. The P6,

when it was being produced, you could actually have a bespoke one.

You could specify the colour,

non-standard colours, have the trim how you wanted it colour-wise.

So if it was good enough for Rover to do that,

we feel that if you choose to do that later in life with it

when you restore one, then fine.

If you want flames up the side and side pipes on it, fine.

Do it!

-But you wouldn't?

-Um, yeah, I would, actually!

# The happy pair were married... #

This was a decade of full employment and good holidays.

The Holidays With Pay Act allowed 11 million workers in the UK

not to worry about earning money

when they were enjoying the delights of the British seaside.

-# By a tiny stream

-By a tiny stream... #

It was the age when motoring was still a treat.

The traditional taking a spin on a Sunday,

Dad driving, Mum with the picnic, and kids playing I Spy

on the bench seat in the back,

each one hoping that they would be the first to see the sea.

# In Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen By The Sea...! #

The popularity of the car even extended to the pier and fairground.

As soon as you got out of the vehicle you had come in,

you got straight on the dodgems,

the advantage being that now the kids could do the driving.

# You are my theme for a dream

# Yes, you are A rare and lovely theme

# You're a theme for a dream... #

Between 1950 and 1970, the proportion of holidaymakers

travelling by car grew from 30% to 70%.

Those going by train fell from 47% down to 12%.

A decline only accelerated by the Beeching cuts

to the branch lines.

# When I touch you

# Each and every time A chime rings out

# I love you... #

This was the heyday of the British holiday,

a 20-year period of fun and pleasure at the seaside

before cheap air travel and the package holiday

muscled in and took it all away.

'Come on, get a move on. Mustn't waste a second.

'We're off on our holiday and we've just got to fly.'

# Do you know the way to San Jose?

# I've been away so long

# I may go wrong and lose my way... #

But while British holidays went out of fashion, the car kept its appeal,

reinventing itself for the next generation.

# LA is a great big freeway

# Put 100 down and buy a car... #

For the young, free and carefree-of-kids,

the car was much more than just a status symbol, it was a sex symbol.

# ..And all those stars that never were

# Are parking cars and pumping gas

# You can really breathe In San Jose... #

The landscape of youth was increasingly codified by the car.

Sex, rock'n'roll and celebrity

were all enveloped in the mushrooming 1960s car culture.

# ..Fame and fortune is a magnet

# It can pull you far away from home

# With a dream in your heart You're never alone... #

This was the age of the mini-skirt and the Motor Show,

selling men the idea

that if they bought the car, then the girl came free.

# ..Pack your car and run away

# I've got lots of friends In San Jose... #

Part of the glamour and attraction of the car was the promise of speed.

And now everyone wanted the open road.

What the car had first promised -

journeying into the past, serendipity, leisure -

was abandoned for speed and convenience.

The motorway was the answer.

And the M1 led the way.

# Get your motor running

# Head out on the highway

# Looking for adventure

# In whatever comes our way

# Yeah, darling Go, make it happen... #

We had a two-tone Vauxhall Velux. It sticks in my memory

even though I was very young, doing 100 miles an hour

in that Vauxhall Velux, looking over a bench seat,

and no seat belts, no child seats

to hold you back, stood up in the back

looking over the bench seat at the speedo showing 100 mph.

I can picture it vividly.

It's one of those things that sets you up for life, I think.

The speed and efficiencies of the motorway came at a terrible price.

They scythed through our countryside

and started to hollow out our cities.

They brought with them pile-ups, pollution

and the unending roar of commuter traffic.

However many motorways were built, traffic soon filled them up.

And a new word was added to the English language - gridlock.

In the process, a new vision of Britain

was forged from the middle lane.

A narrower, rougher, uglier sense of nationhood.

# Motorway food Is the worst in the world

# You've never eaten food like you've eaten on the motorway

# Motorway food Is the worst in the world

# Oh, that motorway living

# Ain't it a thrill To be so free, yeah?

# Riding down the motorway Got to charge up my battery

# Rest my seat, rest my eyes So tired, tired of living... #

With the motorway came all the dreary,

functional accoutrements of modern motoring.

Whereas Priestley and Morton

had enjoyed nothing more than an undiscovered church

and a good pub lunch, now we have the service station.

# Oh, that motorway living... #

This is Heston services on the M4, opened by Miss Jennifer Lewis,

better known as Miss United Kingdom, 1968.

Supposing you're a motorist and you want petrol.

You come along here,

along this slip-road which has an upward gradient

and allows ample time to stop at the filling station, which is here.

# Motorway tea is warm and wet

# The rain is a pouring And it's four in the morning

# And it's all I can get... #

Leisure, family time and pottering through England

were replaced by the speed and convenience

of a souped-up works canteen.

The eating, the drinking, the mingling with fellow motorists

fell away for a pit stop, refuelling yourself and your car.

The joy of motoring was beginning to slip from our fingers.

SIREN BLARES

'On the motorway east of Birmingham,

'Sergeant Bickley is called to another accident -

'a vehicle reported to have somersaulted.'

With the increase in speed and passenger numbers

came an increase in accidents.

Come on, move it!

By the 1960s, impatience, bad driving and drunkenness

meant that motoring had become a dangerous business.

Joyriding took on altogether darker connotations.

There were too many accidents, too many people were dying.

The freedom the motorist had previously enjoyed

now had to be tempered by social responsibility.

Transport minister Barbara Castle's 1967 Road Safety Act

made it compulsory for new cars to have seatbelts.

Clunk the car door, click the seatbelt.

Even if you are just going round the corner, clunk-click, every trip.

And celebrities like Jimmy Savile were brought in

to make people more aware of the dangers of driving.

# And the double-decker bus Crashes into us... #

What had previously been seen as a hobby and a joy

had now become a life-threatening menace.

And motoring was subjected to increasing legislation.

The 70 mph speed limit was extended

and the breathalyser was brought in to combat drink-driving.

'Next week, do-it-yourself breathalyser kits

'will be on sale all over the country.

'When you blow through the yellow crystals of potassium dichromate,

'they turn green above a white line if you've had too much to drink.'

# To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die... #

Motoring also came to be seen as a new source of government income,

with motor tax increases, toll roads and parking fines.

And for some, this legislation was the product of a busybody state,

interfering with the rights

and freedoms to drive whenever, wherever and however they liked.

Even the great historian, AJP Taylor, got in on the act.

Taylor used his column in the Sunday Express,

week in, week out, as a veritable motorist's rant,

decrying the introduction of the breathalyser,

speed limits and a nannying state.

The editor says to me,

"It's a good idea to say we ought not to have bank holidays."

"Oh," I say. "All right. I'll do it." INTERVIEWER CHUCKLES

That's how I write my pieces.

Whereas once, writers had used the car as a vehicle of discovery

for unearthing the heritage and history of England,

now a historian, of all people, urged ever more speed,

ever more motorways,

and ever less interference with the rights of the motorist.

Here's a classic example.

"Why not ban these dawdling drivers?"

With a cartoon of a couple in a caravan holding all the cars back.

What Taylor urges is not just a maximum speed limit,

but a minimum speed limit of 40 miles an hour,

which would be right on dual carriageways and motorways.

"The man who drives too fast

"can have his licence taken away from him.

"Why not the same punishment

"for the man who persistently drives too slowly?"

What AJP Taylor spoke to was a new philistinism in car culture,

and with it,

a growing sense of anger amongst the motorist community,

that despite all the road-building and subsidies,

that the British motorist's right to drive wherever,

however, and whenever they like,

was being undermined by a nannying, socialist state,

with its policemen and traffic wardens,

its speed limits and breathalysers -

the things which Taylor raged against.

The roots of today's petrol protesters, and speed-camera evaders

were set, and first given validity, by a tweedy Oxford don.

By 1970, there were 12 million cars on the road -

six times as many as there had been only 20 years before.

Their demands began to have a dramatic effect

on the fabric and design of our towns.

But the lessons of Coventry had been learned.

Instead of trying to convert a medieval city into a modern city,

why not build a new town from scratch?

This is the original vision of Milton Keynes.

A village green.

A church.

And a pub.

And this...

is Milton Keynes today.

A shopping centre, an A road or two, and a series of car parks.

This little Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire

lacks any of the informal associations,

the chaos, the individuality of the traditional English town.

Instead, it is a conurbation

designed entirely around the internal combustion engine.

# Don't you be a traffic light

# Don't you be a traffic light

# With all things said

# You turn to red

# Don't you be a traffic light... #

Community without propinquity

was the clumsy watchword of the Californian designer, Melvin Webber,

as he laid out Milton Keynes.

The result was this vast, low-density,

low-build, sprawling exurbia in the Buckinghamshire fields -

the polar opposite of the tight, Cotswold villages,

and narrow country lanes, which Priestley and Morton had so revered.

One of the minor problems with Webber's master plan

for Milton Keynes was that it was based on the Californian highways,

and the freedom of the roads, but in Milton Keynes,

all you seem to have are roundabouts and red lights.

It's an unsettling mixture.

Modernist architecture, built on top of ancient plans and ley lines.

Even as the planners laid out this modernist wonderland,

they couldn't help but make a fetish of the past,

with a series of street names and place names,

evoking a lost pastoral idyll of Olde England.

In fact, the England which Milton Keynes had concreted over.

# Don't it always seemed to go

# That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?

# You pave paradise

# Put up a parking lot

# Oooh, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba

# Pave paradise

# Put up a parking lot. #

When it was first built, parking lots in Milton Keynes were free.

Now you have to pay for them.

The world's biggest congestion-charging scheme begins in London.

In fact, motoring has now become a source of revenue,

rather than pleasure.

6.45 this morning - a steady flow into central London,

but little sign

of the expected rush to beat the moment

when the biggest congestion-charging scheme in the world goes live.

250,000 vehicles a day enter the charge area.

The set-up cost of congestion charging, £200 million.

But the truth is, we only have ourselves to blame.

As each of us has sought the open road,

the speed cameras and traffic jams have multiplied.

The old, heroic individualism of the great age of motoring

is simply incompatible with an era of mass ownership.

Since AJP Taylor's rants,

the car as a symbol of the free-born Englishman's rights

has only intensified.

Despite all its roads and motorways

destroying much of what once constituted Britain -

the countryside, the cities, the coasts -

the car has embodied a new sense of national identity,

in which the individual is under the cosh of the state.

And now the car is in the front line of a new war against Whitehall,

with its CCTV cameras, its ID cards, and its police surveillance.

What we're meant to do now, is drive a car like this.

Goodbye, Daimler, Bullnose Morris,

and Austin Healey.

Hello, Smart car.

The pleasure of motoring has all but disappeared.

So why do we do it?

We sit here in these traffic jams, clogging up the city,

spewing out greenhouse gas,

getting parking tickets and speeding tickets,

and increasingly angry.

Perhaps because, as the advertisers know,

there still lurks within us, the allure of speed,

the wonder of the car, and a desire for the open road.

# We know a place

# Where no planes go

# We know a place

# Where no ships go

# Hey!

# No cars go

# Hey!

# No cars go

# Where we know... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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