Falling in Love The Secret Life of the Motorway

Once upon a time, motorways in Britain were new and exciting.

Speed. Speed. That was the excitement, really,

of what the motorway brought to driving.

Driving in Britain was never gonna be the same again.

'This driver is about to commit one of the deadly sins of the motorway.'

TYRES SCREECH, HORN BLARES

'Three cars and one lorry in peril, because one driver forgot one simple rule.'

Turn on to this shimmering new road,

this great yellow brick road leading to a kind of new Jerusalem.

Today there are 2,211 miles of motorway in Britain.

We take them for granted.

It's hard to imagine life without them.

'The joys of the open road.'

But just 50 years ago, there were no motorways in this country...

'Ever tried to pass one of these chaps on a narrow road?'

..and far from idyllic country lanes, Britain's post-war roads were jammed,

our city centres were grinding to a halt.

HORNS BLARE

It was wretched and miserable, and everywhere stank of petrol.

The cars were very leaky and belched out a lot of oil with their exhaust,

to a hot, oily, smelly, petrol-y world, and desperately slow,

so things weren't really very romantic in terms of driving in the 1950s.

For years, Britain has been handicapped by a road system geared to a bygone age,

with traffic jammed to a standstill on roads that were never made to take so many family cars.

Main roads were desperately slow, they really were like clogged arteries,

and what the motorways promised was kind of open heart surgery on the road system.

There had been motorways in Europe for 30 years.

The first one in the world was built in Italy in 1924,

followed by Germany in 1929.

The big difference between Germany, Italy and Great Britain in terms of building motorways

was before the war, they had Fascism and Nazism. They had totalitarian states there.

Think of Mussolini - Mussolini was a man always in a hurry.

He liked to be filmed boxing, running, jumping, doing weights,

driving his Alfa Romeo sports cars. He was always filmed in a hurry, and he loved that notion of speed,

and that was something he was able to impose on Italy.

He was always going to march on Rome,

and the motorways came with that philosophy.

Hitler - exactly the same. I mean, different sort of character.

Hitler said, "Vee vill have zee autobahnen!"

and the autobahns, strangely enough, were built, no option.

But in Britain, the slow pace of Whitehall bureaucracy held back any plans we may have had

to build motorways, and then the war put a stop to them altogether.

Peacetime brought more pressing issues for the new Labour government, with new homes and schools to build

and a National Health Service to create.

'This leaflet is coming through your letterbox one day soon.'

Before motorways could be built, the Special Roads Act had to be passed, in 1949,

but, even then, construction was hampered by rationing.

It wasn't until the mid-'50s that the first motorway in Britain was built.

Rather than the M1, it was the Preston bypass, later known as the M6.

Preston's infamous gridlock had been causing major delays

and holding up trade to Scotland, but getting the go-ahead from Whitehall

was due to the efforts of one man - Sir James Drake, the county surveyor for Lancashire.

He as constantly down here in Whitehall,

and he was a sturdy little bloke, and he argued fiercely,

sometimes so fiercely that they wished he would go away,

which wasn't very helpful in his own cause.

He was that sort of chap, a bit acerbic, if you like, but he was an enthusiast.

He did bully the Ministry, and thank goodness he did.

It's to his credit,

because we might not have even got any motorways yet

if he hadn't had been so dogmatic and what have you,

but he was a bully.

Originally planned as eight miles of dual carriageway, work began on the Preston bypass in 1956.

I remember that there was a lovely feeling

about walking out early in the morning over these fields

that were covered with dew, and you thought,

"Well, this is just fantastic!

"How lucky I am to be having a job like this."

Of course, one couldn't get away from the fact that, all too soon,

it was going to be ripped up with big machines

and it would never be green grass again in that bit.

Over eight miles long, it will be the first motorway to be built in Britain.

The traffic signal gives the all clear,

and a bulldozer goes ahead regardless of anything on its route.

It's followed by a series of robot road-makers.

A fleet of machines were brought in to excavate the ground and level it.

Britain's first motorway, the Preston bypass, was built through some of the wettest weather of the 1950s.

It was opened, to much press attention, on the 5th December 1958

by the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

Today, we are celebrating this country's first motorway.

There were lots of people wanting to get onto it, the moment it was opened,

and I was right at the front of the bit of slip road by the barrier

and the official cortege went past with all the VIPs, and so on,

and the chap who was sitting next to me said, "Come on, you can get going now!" So off we went.

So I claimed that I was the first person to drive on a motorway, but I don't know whether that's true!

Here is Britain's first motorway.

In those days, eight miles was quite a long way and it took a little while,

so it was a big thing. - "I've driven up Preston bypass."

..Motor roads which will be confined to high-speed motor traffic...

The traffic was queuing up to come and try the motorway out.

Only people who wanted to participate in driving the motorway on the first day, I suppose,

just so they could tell their children, "I went on the motorway on the first day."

This is what it feels like at 500 miles an hour.

And there was no speed limit at all.

Speed, speed!

That was the excitement of what the motorway brought to driving.

Here's our cameraman's impression of motorway in motion -

a bit exaggerated, we admit, but it gives you the idea.

There was a sort of sense of euphoria.

I remember we went with my father

to drive on the Preston bypass, as it was,

the very first weekend it was opened and it was an incredible experience.

He didn't know how to do it, but he got around as there weren't many cars.

I had a Ford Zephyr and I remember doing the complete run end to end,

roundabouts included, at an average speed of 83 miles an hour, and I thought that was pretty spectacular.

83 miles an hour was pretty spectacular in those days!

What was so good about early motorway driving was that the motorways were empty.

Miles ahead, you couldn't see a car on some occasions, or a lorry, or anything,

and so there was a feeling of tremendous sort of excitement.

Here's a family taking their first run down a motorway.

They've heard a lot about these new roads where there are no sharp corners,

no hills and no traffic jams, and they're content to saunter along in the sunshine enjoying themselves.

HORN BLARES

There was no speed limit and no crash barriers between the carriageways.

The Government was concerned about

how people might behave on the motorway,

so they thought, "How will people behave?

"Will they know how to drive on a multi-lane road?

"Will they know how to use junctions, how to join and leave the motorway?

"Will they know that they're not allowed to stop?"

So there was great thought amongst civil servants about how to educate and govern the conduct of drivers.

To help drivers adapt themselves to motorway conditions, the authorities published the Motorway Code,

later incorporated in the Highway Code,

setting out special rules of conduct for safety at motorway speeds.

These rules are common sense. Good drivers have always observed most of them on any fast road,

but, even so, it's essential to study them carefully before driving on the motorway for the first time.

Public information films were produced, explaining the dos and don'ts of motorway driving.

TYRES SCREECH

Three cars and one lorry in peril, and all because one driver forgot one simple rule -

before pulling out to overtake on the motorway, see that the road behind you is clear.

They were lucky.

YOU might not be.

How far is the next slip road?

I believe the sign said eight miles.

Eight miles?!

This driver is just about to commit one of the deadly sins of the motorway.

-What are you going to do?

-Turning back.

-You can't, we must go on.

-What, another 16 miles?

-We're late already.

-Please.

-Oh, don't worry, there's nothing to it.

HORNS BLARE

I'm getting out, leave me here. You're mad, we shall be killed.

All right, but I think it would have been the best thing to do.

Watch out, too, for the specially designed road signs.

A mile ahead of your turn-off point, you'll see a warning sign.

The motorway offered a design opportunity.

Road signs in Britain were chaotic,

and came in different sizes, symbols, colours and shapes.

The result was frustration and confusion.

When motorways were in the planning phase,

the Government had appointed a committee to investigate the issue of new signage.

They thought, "Ah, perhaps we might need the help of a designer."

So that was quite a very new thing for somebody,

actually for a committee, a Government committee,

to employ a consultant designer.

How do they differ from present motor signs?

We've used a mixture of block letters and small letters for greater legibility.

Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert were charged with developing

a new signage system for Britain's motorways.

They realised that the absolute essence

of an efficient motorway signage system was clarity.

The signs had to be easy to read, instantly recognisable to motorists,

motorists had to understand what they were saying

and it had to convey essential information to them,

but motorists really didn't need to waste time thinking.

The basic unit, obviously, is the typeface and from that you build out.

So in order to achieve this simplicity, they had to do some very complicated work behind the scenes.

So they thought through every single aspect of the way in which those signs would be read.

The lettering always stayed the same,

you read the symbol first and then you picked out the lettering

and then you got the sense of what the message was, and the route numbers.

So, basically, it's very simple.

And we've also put white letters on a blue background for the same reason.

I remember the formula that I used was ultramarine plus azure-blue,

plus zinc-white, designers' colours.

We were amazed at the size of them.

It staggered us. We just couldn't comprehend that you need a road sign as big as we were making them.

Of course, you're travelling at 70mph and you want to pick up the directions early,

so they're logical and they're correct, but we were surprised.

They are beautifully elegant. They're like works of art in their own right,

but they're also completely, utterly functional,

and that is why today, over 40 years later, that signage hasn't changed.

It doesn't need to change. Perfect typography is perfect typography.

When you're driving along the motorway or a British road, thanks to Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert,

you never have to think about the signs you're looking at.

Keep it simple and it's easier to read and remember,

and it looks good, in its own right, in the landscape.

The Kinneir/Calvert partnership went on to redesign all of the road signs in Britain.

The next motorway to be completed was the M1.

At just 74 miles, it was the first long-distance motorway in Britain.

It stretched from St Albans in Hertfordshire to Dunchurch in Warwickshire.

The M1 was opened on the 2nd November 1959 by Ernest Marples,

the Transport Minister for Macmillan's Tory Government.

It is in keeping with the bold, exciting and scientific age in which we live.

It's interesting the first real motorway in Britain, the M1,

which opened in November 1959, was basically a straight line.

It's like a concrete strip cutting its way through the landscape,

paying virtually no reference to topography.

Who cares about hills, rivers, valleys? Just build as straight as you can.

That was how motorways were conceived - straight line, very fast, no messing around -

and I suppose, as a reflection of that, the actual design,

the engineering and the minimalist architecture around it in terms of structures,

bridges principally were just brutally functional.

Highly efficient organisation on a vast scale, both played a vital part.

The building of the 55-mile northbound section was split into four contracts.

The £16 million contract...

John Laing & Sons Ltd secured them all, but had just 19 months to complete them.

The consulting engineers were Sir Owen Williams & Partners.

Sir Owen had been knighted for his design of the original Wembley Stadium

and was a well-known public figure.

Sir Owen, this is revolutionary in this country, in the way of road construction, isn't it?

I think I can say that there is no other greater effort being made

in the world, comparable to this.

Well, Sir Owen was a very forceful character.

He was a great man to work with because he was,

you know, a wonderful font of anecdotes

because of all the people he'd met during his career,

but he'd established this reputation as a very prominent engineer-architect.

48 surveyors and engineers were engaged in calculating and setting out the centre line of the motorway.

I forget now how many people there were, landowners and people who were involved in that,

but there must have been about 300 odd and he went to see them all,

personally, so that, you know, the objections to the road

were minimal because he'd been to see people and, of course,

at the time building a motorway

and trying to come to terms with the sort of new motorway age

was something that people were in favour of, they thought it was great.

FILM SOUNDTRACK: 'To prepare an accurate construction programme...'

In all, only five houses and three bungalows were demolished to make way for the M1.

20 million tons of rock, chalk and earth had to be excavated to clear the land.

The site was so vast that the latest technology was used to survey it.

'Keeping track of what's happening can best be done from the air.

'By helicopter, checks can be made all along the route in a matter of hours.'

5,000 men were employed to work on the project

and mobile canteens were built every two-and-a-half miles to cater for them.

In all, 183 bridges were built on the M1.

On average, one was completed every three days.

The scene, you've got to imagine the scene, it's hard to believe,

that great construction programme.

I mean, it's heroic in scale, Roman in scale, Victorian in scale.

The M1 was built at a rate of one mile every eight days.

I mean, today when we find it very difficult to build an Olympic or a Wembley Stadium,

try and imagine what that means,

really think, a mile every eight days, completed.

It's really, really fast. It's the speed the Chinese work today in rebuilding Shanghai or Beijing.

That's what the Brits could do at the time.

'Cuttings, embankments, bridges, two-level junctions, all were taking shape in the scarred earth.'

I could name and remember very clearly in particular,

I suppose, the muck-shifting foreman

or the actual agent, the sub-agent on muck-shifting

because these were characters of their own and they had hired and bought in enormous fleets

of often great big motor scrapers, things capable of carrying 40 metres

of muck at one particular time from one place to another.

These guys had a life and a way, you know, and a rule that nobody got in their way

because these machines were enormous.

'One machine doing the work of up to 1,000 men

'and each one costing about as much as a pick and shovel man might earn in a long working lifetime.

'So the earth-moving navvy of today is first and foremost a machine man,

'a driver, a driver as skilled in his way as the driver of a track racing car.'

And they had these big Euclid cleaning the rest of the ground

to get it level, you know, and it was just like a sand dune

these big machines flying up and down.

How long did it take you to get to know how this machine reacts to all these controls?

Well, I'm quite a while now working at machinery for Wimpeys.

I'm seven years driving this type of machine.

'Men of all colours and creeds from all over the Commonwealth

'are helping to build this great, new motorway.'

The construction of the M1 was really, I suppose, a 1950s version

of the building of the railways, 120 years before.

The men that built them were essentially navies.

# I've navvied here in Scotland

# I've navvied in the south... #

The term "navvy" is derived from the inland navigators

who built the canal system in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Mostly Irishmen, "navvy" became the term used to describe all manual labourers.

Between 1951 and 1961 over half a million Irishmen

came to Britain to work in the building and construction industry.

# About navvy man, me boys about navvy man

# I've done me graft and stuck it like a bold, navvy man... #

Most would have left school before the age of 15

because there was no free secondary education.

They were coming from a predominantly rural background,

disadvantaged, unskilled, uneducated

but well used to hard graft out of doors, very tough, very determined people

and they were a godsend to the construction industry in Britain.

Well, the only thing I knew then was labouring.

Then I got driving a machine

and driving cranes and bulldozers and all sorts of machinery,

tower crane and all that

and that set me up for good or better travelling up and down the country.

It was always going out to a job to go with somebody who was working there,

that was your

your reference, you know, and that's how you got on.

You hadn't any details or anything, just "come in tomorrow", you know.

They were used to hardship. They were used to working out of doors.

It was sink or swim. They were determined that they would succeed.

There was no going back. So they had that dogged determination, that stamina, that staying power

and Paddy was used to being down in the trench.

He was quite happy to get in there and make good money at it

because he had the hours, he could put in the overtime and where there's muck, there's brass.

-ON FILM:

-'The work goes on day and night in all weathers, rain or shine.

'Here at Newport Pagnell, the halfway house, the work is nearing completion.

'Enormous concrete mixers are at it 24 hours a day.'

That was hard, very hard work.

Really hard work.

We'd be there digging pick and shovel and they earned their money,

every penny that was earned it was earned in the hard way, for labouring, in my opinion.

As each section of motorway was completed, the site moved on and the workforce needed to move with it.

Many of the workers stayed in local farms or bed and breakfasts.

'There are landladies who have a taste for looking after the kind of men who do real men's work,

'men with hair on their chests and dried concrete on their boots and who do by a...'

I remember going into one digs

and I thought beautiful, beautiful.

And so I went upstairs to bed and the sheets were black.

And I says, "Am I in the right room here?" She says, "Yeah."

I says, I said, "I'm sorry love."

And she says, "Anything is good enough for motorway workers."

For the motorway men who wanted to keep their families with them

mobile caravan sites were set up along the route.

It's estimated that as much as half the workforce on the M1 were Irish.

There were so many that two Catholic chaplains were sent from Ireland to administer to them on site.

No, the Catholics would gather round.

If it was a nice day he'd be in the open air, just have a table in front of him and he'd say Mass, like,

you know, and communion and everything.

They were great that way. There were notes that go up on the canteen.

You'd get to know by word of mouth.

Might be half past ten, eleven o'clock,

but it didn't make any difference, as long as he was finished for the opening time of the pub.

-HE LAUGHS

-That was the main thing!

SIREN BLARES

Ah, you got your wages, like, you queued up.

There was a wages office, like, you have a pigeonhole they paid you out in, like,.

There was no problems that way, you see, that was all done on the site.

That was OK.

You only lived for pay-day,

the other days were dead days, you know.

And they didn't give us wages as such, they gave us beer tokens, you know.

Well, that's what we done with them, like, you know.

HE LAUGHS

Everything was how much beer you can get with it.

"If I buy this this week how much will I have left for a drink?"

Wages were good. Working so far from home in an itinerant culture was to cost many of the navies dearly.

We were just displaced people,

just displaced people, you know.

I used to look at older people than me and I thought is this going to be the end product?

# ..And I washed down mud with pints and quarts of beer

# And now we're on the road again with McAlpine's fusiliers... #

The final touches were being added to the first long distance motorway in the country.

The M1 was finished - on time and on budget at a cost of £16.5 million.

The M1 was opened in almost an apocalyptic atmosphere.

There was a feeling that this road was going to solve Britain's transport problems.

I mean, that's rather oversimplified, but people did feel that

and there was an enormous amount of excitement about it.

'110 miles of carriageway, 200 bridges and culverts - all in 19 months.

'Impossible they said...'

This was the beginning of a new era.

'They'll never do it, but they did, because we're driving along it now at 70 miles an hour.'

It was seen as a glimpse into the future,

the future when we would have a network of these and

most people would be able to make

most of the length of their journeys on these very high-quality roads.

'No cross-roads, two-level junctions with...'

And it was a time of great optimism and the general view was extremely positive.

It was all very exciting.

'A tremendous undertaking triumphantly fulfilled.'

We were invited to the opening of the M1

and I can remember that vividly.

It was a beautiful sunny, summer day

and we were told where we would be meeting for someone to cut the ribbon or whatever

and make the speech

and I remember driving along and there was all this brown soil and these signs were for real.

These were the real beautiful, I thought, white on blue signs

with our lettering and everything

and in the sun and against the earthiness of the banks

it was just very surreal.

And nobody else on the motorway, so we went on and on and on and on

and then we came to the end, there was no more motorway and we somehow missed the junction

or wherever the ceremony was going to happen so we didn't go to it in the end, we missed it.

All our directors were invited to go to the opening and we had passes to go down the motorway,

all the way down, 50 miles down the motorway to get to the opening

and our directors went in the Rolls-Royce, company Rolls-Royce

and it blew up like a tea kettle.

Travelling at 50 or 60 mile an hour, even Rolls-Royce's in that day and age

weren't designed for motorway speeds.

'Britain's first motorway is proving a big attraction for drivers at the weekend.

'It's the novelty of the high-speed run I suppose

'and just as people once went to Croydon to see aeroplanes fly, so now M1 attracts the curious.

'They watch from bridges

'and they travel in coaches on sightseeing jaunts.'

Sundays were often the busiest days on the motorway.

The Sunday afternoon family drive was very popular at this time and many families would go out

and drive along the motorway just to kind of experience it.

The motorway became a destination in itself, a tourist site, because it was so unique and so special.

'A small ceremony but a big event

'and traffic was soon taking this opportunity of trying out a new experience in British road travel.

'A new experience, yes, but, of course, not every car is in condition for sustained high speed.'

Try and imagine what it would be like, you're at the wheel of your family Morris Oxford

which has a top speed of about 50 miles an hour realistically.

You're wobbling along down some A-road, you come to a roundabout,

press heavily on the brakes, down in your gearbox, crunch, crunch

and then turn on to this shimmering new road, this great yellow brick road

leading to a kind of new Jerusalem.

'The M1, for example, stretching for 75 miles north from London.'

And on goes your car. It sounds totally different.

Off the tarmac, onto concrete the wheels instead of going boom, boom, boom, boom,

were starting to go "crrrrrh". This is an incredibly noisy experience.

The car's wandering around, with the wind blowing across the side of the motorway.

Remember, the first motorway totally exposed.

'On these new wide roads one gets no sensation of speed,

'and even at 75 miles an hour you might well be cruising.'

Then, of course, the temperature gauge would go up on the car and the oil pressure of course would drop

and a 60 mile an hour sprint would turn into a ten mile an hour crawl and the thing would break down.

'Some drivers don't seem to grasp the fact that a car

'must be in first class trim if it's going to be driven non-stop for miles at top speed or thereabouts.

'Engines and tyres must be in condition to take such a test.'

So the average car was clunky, solid, old.

Cars looked almost mock Tudor in their design

and they were like mock Tudor houses on wheels, I suppose. They weren't designed for motorways.

And I must say I drove up it very carefully

because I had heard tales that engines would overheat if you flogged it too hard.

So I remember driving...

once we drove all the length of the M1 at 45 miles an hour, which actually is unbelievable now.

With no legal speed limit, the new 74-mile motorway would push many cars to the limit.

The RAC and the AA had to make special provisions.

Er, Mr Ryan, has this new motorway given you any new problems?

No, we don't think so, we, we regard this new motorway as, er, yet another important main road.

Em, we really don't know what's going to happen.

The first night I was on the motorway

I had eight cars all with the same...

All the same make and all the same trouble,

and everyone's going his big ends gone.

The big ends didn't go on that car, it's a car that lasted forever,

and it was the old Hillman Minx.

I mean, you, you can get four or five, six a day, I mean,

all the garages were changing engines as fast as they could go.

WHIRRING

I think your big ends are definitely gone.

'There are telephones along the motorway, but, in any case, help shouldn't be long in coming.

'Here's an AA Mobile Radio Control Centre.

'A patrol van is soon on the way to the breakdown.'

Overheating. About 25% of all the cars which were over five year old had got blocked radiators.

Half the cars hadn't got temperature gauges and they just boiled up.

All of a sudden they'd be going along and,

knock, knock, knock, knock, knock.

Er, either the big ends had gone or the pistons had gone.

Pistons used to melt. You always knew what it was before you got there,

because as you were driving up the motorway

you'd suddenly see a big patch of oil for about a hundred yards on the, on the road, and

it just sort of, as, as he pulled in so the oil would still be dripping, you know,

"Another one gone, I'll go and give him the good news."

We did 13,500 jobs - breakdowns - in the first year the motorway was opened,

and 13,000's a lot of breakdowns.

'Aerial patrols will provide an even speedier method of spotting the motorist in trouble.

'General information about the road conditions and any hold-ups

'can be radioed to AA Headquarters in London.

'30 traffic advisors man this operation's room at Fanum House.

'For motorists from the North, for example, this map shows how they may

'take advantage of the motorway to get to any point in the south-east.'

'As for the motorway itself, there's been a spot of bother with the so-called hard shoulder

'at the side of the road.

'The hard shoulder seems to be soft, in places at any rate.

'Stop in it and you may get bogged down.'

I went on there, of course, we had highly polished boots, and when I got home you couldn't see my boots.

So my trousers was a sort of reddish brown colour and of course,

I just stepped out of the car, out of the Land Rover, you see,

straight into the hard shoulder and down I went.

'Many breakdowns were reported on the first day,

'but there are excellent facilities to deal with these.'

'And with accidents. And on the subject of accidents, Mr Marples had a word of warning

'to all high speed motorists.'

'For on this magnificent road the speed which can easily be reached is so great

'that senses may be numbed and judgement warped.'

We were having a lot of accidents.

We had no crash barriers at first, and so what we did have

were these head-on collisions,

even if they were doing 70 miles an hour,

head-on at a 140 miles an hour.

Now, nobody realised that this was a dangerous thing to put a piece of grass with a bit of gravel,

it was very good for us, police officers,

because if we saw a car that we wanted to stop going the other way

we could swing round, as we did do, on the grass verge.

We would spiral round and fly the other way without thinking about it.

'If you overshoot the turning point don't try to do this.

'Reversing and turning on the motorway is an offence

'which could cost you £20 in a magistrates court.

'If you miss your turning, you must continue along the motorway to the next exit.'

Officially you drove round to the next junction and went back up again.

If it was quiet you went across the central reservation.

And funnily enough the police did the same thing,

ambulance did the same thing, the AA and the RAC, even the garages did it.

'Visitor to Black Bush Airport was Transport Minister Ernest Marples,

'seeking, as always, more safety on the roads.

'He was there to see a car driven at 60 miles an hour against a new type fence,

'flexible but with the 22-tonne breaking strain specially designed for motorways.

A well designed barrier that's meant to bring you, bring your speed down and redirects you safely onto your

own carriageway, better to hit that than to hit someone coming the opposite way at 70 miles an hour.

'The driver was unhurt, and damage to the car was superficial.'

In 1962, Ernest Marples announced the government's plan to complete a thousand miles of motorway.

A year later he commissioned a report into the profitability of British railways,

written by Doctor Richard Beaching.

Doctor Beaching, do you personally believe that the government has no

real alternative but to accept your plan?

I think that these proposals are in the long-term interest of railwaymen.

I think they'll go along with this...

Beaching was, I suppose, the first executive businessman

to be put in charge of the railways, he was an ICI executive.

..towards making the railways do those things that they can do best.

But he came in with this brief to slash them up, to axe them.

There's a famous phrase, the Beaching Axe.

Today's report will shape the future of the system.

More than 2,000 stations will be closed, the most dramatic effects are in Scotland.

Remote areas of the Highlands will lose their services, Wales takes a body blow as well.

Holiday resorts in the West Country share the fate of many market towns, no station, no passenger trains.

In the north-east little more than the main North/South links will remain.

'These carriages which have carried generations of holidaymakers and people going to the office

'have come to the end of the line.

'Anything that can be used again economically is salvaged, but

'there is nothing much that can be done with old woodwork except this.'

It meant the abandonment of enormous assets

which were the creation of the previous century,

and now we very much wish we hadn't done it.

So Beaching was a believer that the railways were, essentially, old-fashioned.

He was going to modernise them, but it also meant, in a way,

undermining them, and giving traffic to the motorways.

Motorways may have been the fastest way to travel, but they were still at the mercy of the British weather.

And then we've just got here now.

-How far have you come?

-About five mile.

-And that's taken you over three hours?

-Yes, close on that.

How does this compare with other fogs that you've driven in?

This is about the worst I've had, definitely. Definitely the worst.

Fog was much more common in the mid-1960s, than, than nowadays

because of industrial air pollution and coal fires in houses and so on.

In particular, you were afraid to go too slowly in case you get hit from behind,

and then of course you find you've hit something in front.

And so you got these multi-vehicle pileups which were a new phenomenon.

There's cars coming through the fog...50, 60 miles an hour.

They couldn't see, well, you couldn't see across three lanes, so you can just imagine what it...

They were just hurtling and... and they'd go, you know, they'd go "eeeeooow, bump!"

"eeeeooow, bump!"

And this would happen on a regular basis, 40 or 50 cars all smashed into one another.

Somebody devised a wonderful scheme where we had two spotlights - orange spotlights - on a big, black pole,

connected, because there was no electricity, connected to a car battery in a box beneath it.

These were every mile so that when the fog arrived

the police car on that section could switch a switch and switch these two flashing lights on.

And then...

people without a car battery would think, "There's a lot of car batteries on the motorway."

So we would then come to these signs in an emergency, perhaps they hadn't been on for three weeks,

batteries all gone.

'Again electronics come to man's aid and save time and effort.

'Motorway police have been armed with ray guns, they're harmless except for fog warning lights.'

We were a bit like cowboys then, we couldn't wait for the headquarters to say

"can you switch all the fog signs on?"

"Ho, ho, get my gun out and away we go."

'A motorway cop shows how good a marksman he is on the move with the new space-age lamplighter.

'Ready, aim, fire.

'Good shot.'

But we were even better than that, we got really good at it, because if you could get this one on

and swing round, you could get the one on the other carriageway

in one fell swoop, and it was, "I got them all on this time,"

and police were going, "Yes, I got the lot."

And if somebody missed one, ohhh, and you had to reverse all the way back,

-"Oh, you're getting... Swap over and I'll put the lights on"

-'Good shot.'

Along with radar guns, motorway police had faster cars than their colleagues on the A-roads.

'It's what you might call light work.'

We had the Mark II Jaguar when I first went on the motorway.

Then we altered to the Jaguar XJ6, that was an improvement.

When they were being made, the factory knew which ones were ours.

And we only knew that they knew which were our cars when we came to cut the headlining in the car

to put the police signs on the top.

And then we would find written in the top "all coppers are bastards".

SIREN WAILS

With no speed limit and no legal requirement to wear seatbelts,

motorways became the scene of some of the most horrendous accidents.

In 1966 Barbara Castle, the new Labour Secretary for Transport,

and first female Cabinet Minister introduced a preliminary speed limit of 70 miles per hour.

..For the British motorist has got fed up with being pushed around by successive governments...

-But there were still those that resisted it.

-..and parking restrictions.

-You're here to protest?

-Yes, we are.

-Why?

Well, because I think it's stupid.

I drive about 24,000 miles and a lot on motorways and it's quite ridiculous

if you're expected to sort of dawdle along at 70 miles an hour.

How fast have you been in your car?

Erm, I've had it up to about a 115.

If you examine the accidents

you find that speed is a terribly important, terribly

is the word, important element in the causation of road accidents.

And here were fast roads, built to,

for the purpose, safer, but speed can be too great for them.

So don't have it.

For safety's sake.

Barbara Castle, what does she think of? People, safety. Yes, right.

The main thing that I remember about Barbara Castle

was the opening of the next length of the London/Yorkshire motorway

when she was the Minister of Transport,

and this was at the time when she was fore-fronting the seatbelt campaign.

And I suppose at some expense we had hired a Rolls-Royce

for her to drive in, drive along the motorway when it was opened,

and she wouldn't get in it, because it hadn't got seatbelts in the back.

So she wouldn't travel in this expensively hired Rolls-Royce.

By 1968 seatbelts, breathalysers and the 70 mile-per-hour speed limit had become law.

The thousand-mile motorway plan continued

with one of the most ambitious and adventurous schemes yet -

to build the highest motorway in Britain.

While the M1 took just 19 months to complete,

the seven-mile Pennine section of the M62 would take nearly seven years.

The M62 is the great trans-Pennine motorway

and it is a truly magnificent achievement.

Now, that's very rare in Britain to have a motorway which is quite

mountainous in British terms, and a motorway, of course, where you get tremendously foul weather.

Originally a packhorse route, the A62 was the only road across the Pennines connecting Yorkshire and Lancashire.

By the early 1960s it was grid-locked with lorries and trade was being severely affected.

In the winter months, vehicles could be trapped under 12-foot snow drifts,

and sections of the route closed for up to four months at a time.

The purpose of the design of the M62 or the basic remit was to ensure

that it was going to be kept open all the time and not be closed to snow.

In other words, they wanted a motorway that

was going to be kept open for seven days a week, 52 weeks of the year and never closed to traffic.

The Pennine section was to be by far the biggest challenge.

Climbing to a height of 1200 feet it would mean blasting through rock to create a dam.

The engineers would then have to build the largest single-span bridge in Europe,

while the planned route for the motorway lay across a peat bog.

It's not possible to build a motorway over a peat bog

because it'll not support anything.

And bearing in mind it's such a high moisture content,

it would be better to go through it in a boat.

And the contractor actually lost a series of machines in the peat.

OK, they were recovered eventually, but it presented an enormous problem.

The only way to start building on the bog was to remove the peat.

'How to get the peat out?

'The only answer was to work with a large faced shovel using the underlying...'

All eleven and three-quarter million cubic yards of it.

The only machine that can actually traverse it was the Muskeg, the Muskeg tractor.

'This Muskeg tracked vehicle was light enough to cope

'with the soft, spongy ground and steep-sided clods, and...'

The man put in charge of this challenging project was 28 year old Jeffrey Hunter.

He made regular appearances in many of the films that were made about the motorway.

This job is different.

The whole geography's against us.

The weather conditions are against, they're extremely adverse.

The Pennine weather was so harsh that few people lived there.

Although only half a dozen people lived on the planned motorway route,

it was to have a huge impact on their lives.

One house was to become almost as famous as the motorway itself.

It's a shame really cos there used to be a myth around for many years

after a motorway being constructed that the farmer living in the house wouldn't move

and refused to move and therefore we divided the carriageways and put it round it.

That, in essence, sadly, is not true.

In fact, the motorway was built around the farmhouse

because the land on which it was standing was unstable and had to be shored up.

It was cheaper to build two roads around it.

The Wild family were living there at the time.

Well, you don't think of big diggers and trucks and

people everywhere, do you, running past your window?

They come on with the...

UT's are they? The big wagons full of stone,

and every so often there'd be a bang and the quarry would go boom!

And frighten you to death.

Yeah, you never knew when they were gonna be blasting.

It must have been very difficult for the occupant, Mrs Wild, at the time.

The only time I ever met her was because of complaints of dust, and I could understand that problem.

'The whole roads pounded by heavy vehicles soon dissolved into fine dust

'that choked men and machines and reduced visibility to nil.'

You could not hang your washing out

because they worked from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, seven days a week.

'It caused collisions and delays and complaints from farmers some

'distance away that their crops were being smothered.'

It were pointless cleaning the house

because it was just absolutely covered in dust.

So I used to have to start cleaning the house at eight o'clock at night when they stopped.

We actually watered the formation to keep the dust down

and to make certain that she and her family and everybody else could live there.

The M62 was national news.

Work went on seven days a week and the site was inundated with visitors.

Tourists came by the coach load on Sunday afternoons

to watch as seven million cubic yards of rock was excavated to create the Scammonden Dam.

Running on top of it, a 200-foot high motorway embankment was being constructed.

The original plan for the motorway cut across the ancient route

of the Pennine Way and would have meant diverting walkers.

But ramblers, including the Transport Secretary Mr Marples, had objected.

So a special footbridge was built across the motorway allowing the walkers to continue their journey.

Across Dean Hill Cutting, the largest single spanned bridge in Europe was being constructed.

Covered in 70 miles of scaffolding to protect it from wind speeds

of up to a 110 miles per hour in the Pennine winter

it was able to withhold the weight of 1100 tonnes of ice.

Nobody appreciates just how big and how massive that structure is

because it's dwarfed by the vastness of the landscape around it.

It looks just a small bridge spanning over a motorway

in the middle of a cutting. The cutting's sufficiently wide enough

to absorb the whole of the new Wembley Stadium.

Put it in the middle of it, you wouldn't see it because everything around it

is lost in the horizon behind it.

The climate was probably the most atrocious thing that we had to cope with.

The engineering problems and considerations one can make decisions on.

One can't control the climate.

Now, I'm an old man now and it's 40-odd years

since I took part in this contract,

but the climatic conditions were the thing, probably, that are so deeply imprinted on my mind

that man and machine had to endure fighting the climate constantly.

This is also the only place in the world where it'll actually rain up your confounded trouser legs.

I should explain this, the wind comes down these valleys very quickly indeed,

rain driven in its path it actually blows it uphill.

It's terribly frightening when it occurs to you.

And it wasn't only driving rain and wind at the time, it was dramatic drops in temperature.

It was working in constant cloud.

'And when it comes down it's accompanied by a...'

-It was a matter of survival.

-'..Exposure can set in.

'Men then, and machinery, begin to suffer.'

Oh, the conditions were terrible.

The conditions were really bad, even for me within the machine.

Aye, when you went in there in the morning, you were cold.

Next thing you'd look round and, geez, you couldn't see nothing.

The only thing you could do then is stop.

And somebody would come and rescue you.

It was very frightening, so it were.

By geez, when it rained there it rained.

It was like something like the monsoons, like, you know.

It used to come down and start off like and the next thing

you'd be, you'd be shivering in the cab.

You were saying, "Well, yes, I hope it doesn't come in here." Oh, yes.

There were days on end when you couldn't work.

And you had to either sit in the cabs or in the rest huts waiting for the rain to ease off,

you just had to sit there and literally they ate mud, walked in mud, sat in mud

and were aware of mud, and there was mud in the sandwiches.

Whenever possible, because of these conditions, work was extended sometimes to 24 hours a day.

If you could work round the clock under floodlights we did, and had to.

'Day, dusk, sometimes clean through the night and round to another day.

'Keep going while the weather's with you...'

And you didn't have very good lighting, you just had a few old lights on the gibbet crane

and sometimes you wouldn't be able to see a lot, but you'd manage it.

And that might be going on at twelve or one o'clock in the morning.

And it took a lot of skill on the driver's part

and it took a lot of skill on the banksmen's part,

it was the banksmen on top directing you in, like, you know.

Our jobs were concentration more than anything else, you know,

when you were driving a crane you had to concentrate or you could kill somebody.

Touch wood I never had a... I never had an accident.

They had to give up work, I don't know...

The second winter, I think, because of the weather conditions.

Everything was bogged down, they couldn't move a thing.

And I think they finished for three months.

And then they came back with a vengeance.

And it were, oh, it were like bedlam.

But, then again, you got used to it again.

'On October the 14th 1971 in glorious weather

'the project was honoured by a visit from Her Majesty, The Queen.'

With the opening of the Scammoden Dam, the Pennine section of the M62 was finally complete.

The overall length of this Pennine contract was just short of seven miles,

and it took £7 million to build, which is literally a million pounds a mile.

And now today you can traverse it in seven minutes.

And it's ironic to think that people that go across it now

never sort of really can think or envisage what actually happened in those days some 45 years ago.

'Man's great ingenuity and willingness to accept such enormous challenges

'has brought to a successful end this Pennine project.'

A mile of motorway a week had been opened between 1960 and 1970,

the next challenge was to start joining some of them up.

Fifteen years in the planning and construction,

Gravelly Hill Interchange, or Spaghetti Junction as it's better known,

would be different to anything that had gone before it in the history of British motorway construction.

Across five different levels, raised on 600 reinforced concrete columns,

this was to be the link between the M1, the M5 and the M6.

Crammed onto a 30-acre site, it needed to be choreographed around

both the existing industry and the local community.

Well, of course, when it started, well...

-Oh, the mess was dreadful.

-It really... Absolutely awful. You can imagine.

Oh, the dust.

The kids came in and with the dirt and, you know,

you pushed your pram through it and if it was a wet day

you still had to push it back into the hall cos you couldn't leave it outside,

and it was, it was just, just a nightmare.

Dust, the dirt was just a nightmare.

Well, the first time I think we heard

was the next door neighbour and he, he said to us

do you know there's a motorway coming here?

So we just thought, well, we'll wait and see what happens, you know, so...

-Then the motorway came.

-By that time it just came. We were trapped.

'175,000 cubic yards of concrete.'

The engineers had to elevate 13.5 miles of motorway to accommodate

two railway lines, three canals and two rivers.

'Building a viaduct of this length needed careful planning and design.'

It was a great canal system in Birmingham

and we had to provide a column arrangement

so that you could still tow a barge with a horse.

I went mad when they said, made me angry when we had to do that,

so we rearranged the columns

so that they could get the horse round there.

It was an interesting job, certainly.

'You can see why they call it Spaghetti Junction,

'though the engineers point out that unlike a plate of spaghetti it stands up and it's highly planned.'

Spaghetti Junction is anything but a formless lump,

it required a great deal of engineering, planning and design

before its final shape was achieved.

But, yes, it is a, I think, a remarkable achievement.

-I think it was a clever thing.

-Yeah.

I think it's been quite a clever thing for the people that it hasn't affected.

But it's not a pleasant thing to live by.

I think the engineers that built it should come and live here...

..for at least a month,

with all the windows propped open.

Just 14 years after the Preston Bypass was opened,

Spaghetti Junction was completed.

It was opened in November 1972 by Peter Walker,

the Environment Secretary for Edward Heath's Tory government.

And this is perhaps the most exciting day in the history of the road system in this country.

The job fell to him because the departments responsible

for transport, housing and local government had been combined,

a sign of the changing attitudes to motorways and their impact on the environment.

-WALKER:

-And it is, if I may say so, a triumph for motorway engineering.

Hence more important, an illustration of how motorways can improve environments.

I declare this motorway open.

By 1972 a thousand miles of motorway had been built in Britain and another thousand was expected.

From the first eight miles of the Preston Bypass to the engineering feats of Spaghetti Junction,

Britain's love affair with the motorway had truly begun.

Next time we look at how the motorway changed our lives and where it's taken us.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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