The Honeymoon Period The Secret Life of the Motorway

When Britain's first stretch of motorway opened in 1958

it was greeted with huge enthusiasm and optimism.

Away with smoke-filled railways, away with villages and cart-horses and ploughs,

this was the scientific, a white-hot technological age.

This is something entirely new in this country.

Motorways seemed to promise a world of prosperity and freedom, and we've flocked to them ever since.

The typical toilet on a motorway service area probably cops for 40,000 flushes a year.

Do you remember those little tins called travel sweets?

I used to think in what way is a travel sweet different?

But in our rush down the slip-roads, just where have motorways actually taken us?

From the 1960s onwards, we checked our tyres, crossed our fingers for the fan-belt and loaded up the boot.

Like so many love affairs, our relationship with motorways began on a holiday.

We set off on a voyage of discovery.

We drove onto this virtually trafficless motorway.

My father hadn't a clue how to negotiate a road like this,

but we somehow made it and it was literally a breathtaking experience.

It was like the beginning of a new world such as we'd never known and never hoped even to experience.

What I mainly remember from childhood motorway journeys is the deep feeling of excitement,

and you wanted that excitement to last for as long as possible.

So I think the journey bit was much more important.

My mother made pockets which she put on the back of the front seats

and they were filled with our kind of toys and books and stuff.

It was all part of this incredibly elaborate preparation for this epic journey, when really you were

probably only going to the Lake District.

Part of the excitement of travelling on a motorway, was the geography was different.

So you suddenly saw hills or very flat areas of land.

You saw bits of seaside

that you'd only seen on your school atlas before.

You heard these regional accents which made something about the foreign-ness, but also

the availability of travelling to these bits of the country and seeing people in those environments.

So things I had read about,

suddenly were there.

I could experience them.

I was suddenly aware that people were on the move, as was I.

And the new roads were opening up a whole new world of possibilities.

Before the motorways, the average Briton

holidayed in one of just 200 seaside resorts at the end of a train ride.

Rising car ownership and the improved road network was to revolutionise that.

Every AA route section includes sketch maps of this kind.

There is a Routes Production Department in every AA office.

One impact of the motorways was a huge change in the way we spent our leisure.

Essentially, we chose to make many more short leisure trips,

day trips and weekend trips than we ever had before.

That was partly because we could, because we had the cars, because

we had the motorways, but partly also because we had the disposable income.

Many more people are going to the places where fewer people are.

It's still possible in 1964

to find places where there are relatively few people.

But then by the time you double up the number of cars, all those places where fewer people are will be

the places where lots of people are, so this defeats itself in the end, doesn't it?

I think that we can get out of this one by discovering

more places for people to go and telling more people about them.

Hmm.

The guidebook industry took off,

capitalising on people's new ability to travel and desire to learn all about Britain,

even down to the lampposts.

The best selling children's book "I Spy" launched an edition just for motorways.

Enjoying the motorway, think of your car as a magic carpet

taking you to explore new country which you would not otherwise see.

Make sure you are comfortable, wear the right clothes, give yourself plenty of room.

Certainly "I Spy" books did encourage the notion that going on a journey could be something that was

pleasurable, because we were passing through places where there were lots

of identifiable features that you had to tick off in the "I Spy" book.

So we could record those very mundane features

that are very distinctive to national identity.

So, for instance, a British "I Spy" book

book would be useless on the road to France, nothing would fit.

Even as a very small child you would talk quite authoritatively

about, you know, oh, yeah, he's pulling into the fast lane.

Even though you couldn't drive, I couldn't even ride a bicycle without stabilisers.

Any journey on the motorway provides dozens of things to look out for.

Continental lorries, police cars, cattle browsing in the fields and country houses.

We were quite lucky, because where we lived, there were lots of short motorway journeys you could make

that would take you to very big and rather impressive stately homes

which my mother was completely devoted to, and of course we hated.

All over Britain the castle gates, once so firmly closed, are being

thrown wide open to the world and his wife and their children as well.

If you take motorways and day trips and combine them with what was happening to aristocratic families,

which was that they were unable to carry on running their homes, the two things coming together,

I do think that is part of the democratisation of Britain.

And the motorways literally and metaphorically link those two things.

As soon as motorways released this demand and the ability to

travel inland, then a huge shift,

essentially, to self-catering types of accommodation took place.

So caravans, B&Bs making it possible for people to travel when they wanted, how they wanted,

to take their luggage, to have entirely their own convenience choice of times.

It changed a very old-fashioned model of holidays into something

that fitted with the way people see their needs in the present day.

In less than 20 years, caravanning has established itself

as one of the most popular ways of spending a holiday in this country.

The Caravan Club, which was started in 1907 with 11 members,

today has nearly 50,000, all with touring caravans.

I started caravanning approximately 35 years ago,

just after my fourth baby was born,

and holidaying became very expensive with four small children.

And so we bought a touring caravan.

I loved the freedom of it, to be able to come and go wherever we liked.

The opening of motorways did make caravanning so much easier.

You could get onto a motorway, you knew that the other traffic would pull away from you.

You feel a lot more relaxed because you're not on edge

the whole time that you're building a tailback behind you.

We would look, and particularly if a new piece of motorway opened, you'd think, ooh, yes,

we could take the caravan up and take the kids to the Blackpool lights.

Now Britain's ever-increasing tourist attractions

are branded according to their proximity to the motorway.

But there is one destination with unparalleled motorway access.

Because once the British are on the move, what they really want is a cup of tea.

It's the start of the holiday and it's the first stop

and they're all excited and,

they run in and see the shop and they see all the toys

and the cash machines and all the pretty lights.

Gordano, Knutsford, Charnock Richard, Hamilton.

..Sandbach, Leicester Forest East services - don't know if there is a Leicester Forest West.

Newport Pagnell,

Scratchwood,

Heston.

There was one particular service station that all us children were particularly enthralled by,

and that was Forton Service Station near Lancaster which has the most fabulous viewing platform.

It was almost like a kind of science fiction building, it seemed to herald a kind of future utopia.

We would always demand to stop at that point and have a look round.

This is something entirely new in this country.

You will notice that there are two identical stations opposite to each other on the motorway, here.

In fact, the novelty of going to a service station was such

that the British motorist commemorated the event in style, with a postcard.

"Here we have arrived and have stopped off for an ice and a stretch. Lovely day.

"Having some ankle trouble as I'm travelling without shoes. Lovely!

"Janet and family were disappointed - they wanted to see Derek.

"Love to all, PG."

That would have been part of the whole treat of going onto the motorway is to stop.

That's part of the charm of actually having these cards

as a memento of this time

when these places meant so much more to us.

They're being met personally by your greeter at Watford Gap Service Station, or wherever it is.

Here we are at Keele, Staffs, so there's literally always a welcome at Forte,

and there's someone actually out there meeting the people as you go in.

So that's something that's quite remarkable. Can you imagine that now?

You'd be laughed at, cos it's really to do with the aspirational notion of the '50s, '60s, '70s

in Britain when it was trying to modernise itself.

So far behind Europe, of course, but still getting there eventually.

In the 1950s, the Government sent representatives

on research trips to motorway service stations across the world.

To Italy, to the Servizios with their fabulous food.

To America, the home of service culture.

They came to the conclusion, however, that the needs of Britain's motorists were rather more modest.

Now, supposing you were a motorist and you want petrol.

They decided that we didn't need Pollo Arrosto, and as it turned out when Watford Gap opened,

even a fry-up was out of the question.

The opening of Watford Gap

was in fact a disaster

because it was not ready for the opening of the M1.

The operators, Blue Boar, had to buy some garden sheds,

paint them bright colours and have sandwiches made which they then sold to motorists from these garden sheds.

Its name wasn't its best feature either.

Watford Gap.

People got confused with that because they thought they was about ten miles from London, you see.

They used to say, "Ooh, we haven't got that far to go."

When you'd tell them it's 74 miles or 75 miles, they'd go mad.

The Italian emigre and catering entrepreneur, Charles Forte, wanted something altogether

more sophisticated for the site he was to run.

Newport Pagnell.

The Government had instructed that the buildings should be dull

in colour and surrounded by trees so as not to distract the driver.

However, Fortes felt that they might lose some custom by doing that.

So when the Government arrived for its final inspection, the Ministry of Transport officials

drove up the motorway to visit Newport Pagnell prior to opening,

they discovered that the trees had been cut down,

no new trees had been planted and the building was, in fact,

a bright yellow rather than the dull grey which had been requested.

The kind of glamour only available in Britain in a few Soho coffee bars

was now there for the taking on the M1.

There was, like, a central aisle, a bit like an American diner where they had seats up at a counter.

The kids just loved it.

It was all about thrills, excitement and something that was just so incredibly new.

It was about glamour.

Yeah, about glamour.

You know, I'd never eaten anywhere where you sat at a bar counter on these high stools drinking

your coffee from these wonderful, big Italian machines, and all the time

as you sat there, you sort of were waiting for something to happen.

And, of course, there was no 70 mile an hour speed limit then.

No crash hat, you just clung on for dear life and you watched the needle on the speedometer go up.

Then this guy in front would say to me, "Right, are you ready? We're going for the ton."

And you watched and you saw the needle go over, over a hundred and keep going over.

Well, well, I slowed down a lot because I could see you coming up,

and I thought, well, I'll let him catch me, see what happens.

And, er, no, I slowed down to about 80, something like that, and you, I'd started accelerating,

a long time before you came past, I must say, you still did some catching up.

-I was, I was amazed at that thing of yours.

-I know.

The services were one of the few places that were open all night, so it was also people-watching.

Tom Jones, The Beatles, Barbara Windsor.

Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, two of the Beatles...

..and they would arrive and go to this haven of delight called the Grill and Griddle,

and you knew as you were sipping your coffee downstairs that they were upstairs and

that there were waitresses with their black skirts and their, you know, their frilly aprons but

they were tucking into steaks, and that was, and that was a luxury item.

Fine dining, previously found in London's West End, spread across the country

as fabulous restaurants opened up over the expanding network.

Some of them even offered the thrill of eating above the motorway itself.

And already there's a motorway vogue in leisure pursuits

among those who like to dine out while watching the cars go by.

The pinnacle of sophistication was the Terence Conran-designed Bridge Restaurant,

at Leicester Forest East.

A lot of people came for evening out, some folk to Sunday lunch.

Quite a lot of people had their Christmas meals here, they booked it in advance.

People thought it was posh because not many places you'd get waitress service,

place-set china.

The piano stood more or less

over there, triangular in that corner over there,

and the gentleman had quite a repertoire of music, but mostly

they liked quiet music, you know, a little bit of Chopin or whatever.

As the network grew, a new generation began to regard

travelling not as a treat, but a right.

Anyone could enjoy the mobility the motorways had to offer with a little bit of help from their thumb.

Even if we had a bit of money we wouldn't think of getting a bus or a train,

we would go to a service station and we would stick our thumb out.

And very often you'd go to a service station

and you'd have to join a queue.

There might be four or five people there with their thumbs stuck out.

There was a kind of an etiquette so you would have to join the queue and wait your turn.

But sure enough, usually, after about an hour you could pretty much expect to get a lift.

Motorways made hitchhiking come of age.

Suddenly hitchhiking moved from a very elementary thing where you stuck your thumb out and walked

down the road and either a car stopped or it didn't,

to somewhere where you actually had to apply

mathematical theories, probability, geography,

velocity, all these concepts suddenly came into play.

If you were somewhere like Hendon where people traditionally began to try to hitch onto the M1,

you would find that you didn't actually want to take that lift to Hemel Hempstead or to Tring

because, quite honestly, that would only take you a few junctions along.

You wanted the big one, you wanted to go to Watford Gap.

But I remember getting picked up by an enormous plethora of people, old hippies, famous footballers,

Irish priests who asked me to do naughty things to them.

There was a whole range of people who you would get picked up by and I think one of the most...

delightful things about hitchhiking was the fact that you would meet this enormous range of people.

By the end of the '70s you could tell that something had happened.

There were fewer people around at the junctions.

I'd sum up Thatcherism as, "I'm all right Jack",

and that whole idea which pervaded all the way through the '80s,

really, did a lot of damage to hitchhiking because people were

driving around in bigger, grander, faster cars but they were thinking,

hmm, well, I'm not stopping for them, why don't they get on their bike and look for work or whatever?

The spirit of the motorways had changed.

Cars had become not just status symbols but sanctums.

The ultimate expression of personal freedom and individuality

into which you invited a stranger at your peril.

The Rutger Hauer film "The Hitcher" hasn't helped matters, but it's certainly the case...

I think people are far more suspicious of people who hitchhike now.

And I don't know why that is - have we become more selfish?

Have we just become more fearful?

I don't think the motorways are any more or less dangerous

than they were, I don't think there's any more maniacs around.

And I can think of no activity today where you have the opportunity to sit

in a car with somebody you've never met before

and somebody you're never gonna see again and chew the fat and chat about a whole range of different things.

Your hitchhiker of today

has nine times out of ten got a dog with him, is a New Age traveller

looking to get a lift to the next place of demonstration.

It used to break the monotony of the journey of years ago,

before radios and CDs and CBs become

standard fitment in lorries.

Can you imagine sitting 300 mile on the motorway with no radio and no music?

I got my whistling down to a fine art in them days.

Today, a motorway journey is unthinkable without some form of soundtrack.

But in the early days of the network,

in-car entertainment was still only available to the privileged few.

I have been keeping my most precious car possession to the last.

Here it is.

A radio set, with which to while away long waits in traffic jams or to relieve the monotony of a long drive.

See how nicely it fits into the instrument panel of the Ford G8 in place of the ashtray. Neat, isn't it?

Neat, but not cheap.

The first factory-fitted radios appeared in the early '30s and they were expensive,

around £35, the equivalent of adding about £2,500 to a VW Golf today.

At the beginning of the '60s,

only 4% of British cars had radios installed.

One of the great revolutions in radio reception was the creation of the transistor.

And it's perhaps very significant that the first stretch of the M1

opens in 1959 and the first transistor radio in this country becomes available in 1960.

So we'd take our little trannies with us, little Bush radios with the batteries and that sort of thing.

So that was quite a thrill to drive along the blackness,

you are in your little cocoon and this music coming through.

As new technology drove down the price, in-car radios flourished.

A significant audience was created that needed to be catered for.

Here is the 8 o'clock news for today, Thursday the 14th.

There are two places where you have a really intimate relation with the listener.

First of all, there is that relationship

with the listener who's in the car because they're a captive audience, the second one is anybody in prison.

The '60s and '70s were very important for the establishment, really, of...

drive time as a key part of the schedule.

People are in their cars - what do you need every day?

You need the weather, you need whether the trains are on time, you need the traffic information.

Radio 1 is here. And what are we here with, you might ask?

With your traffic news.

In order to draw people in to your radio station in the '70s with the added competition,

the programming's got to be right, the music's got to be right and the travel bulletins as well.

You've got to be in touch with your audience.

M25 looked really dire around the M26, you know that junction there if you use it regularly,

if you're a regular there, very slow indeed.

QE2 Bridge absolutely ram-jam, covered in traffic,

big jams yesterday, big jams again today.

And it's screwing up the traffic on the M11 as you come south as well.

There we go, the Flying Eye with O2.

For up to 500 free text messages visit O2.

Well, you know, we're going over to as it was in London with Capital, Russ Kane in the Flying Eye,

and he'd be flying over the thing and he could see probably the best of the lot.

Actually, you could see a certain amount, sometimes you couldn't see a damn thing up there.

I remember going up there once and he was still reporting back

and the information was coming from the ground because it was very foggy up there.

But there was that... it's all theatre of the mind in radio, and

if you can create that atmosphere that there's somebody there hovering

above you keeping an eye on the traffic, it's quite a good ploy to get people to listen in.

The Flying Eye's last daily traffic report was in 2005.

Thank you. How long do you reckon they'll be?

Today it's a network of cameras and control centres that feed travel information to radio stations.

Well, should go northbound, Junction Nine and the police car has just gone down.

Listeners phone and text in the information themselves.

And the M18 is queuing southbound from about three miles down towards the M1.

Thank you Texas Ranger for all your information.

Radio is a community event and increasingly today with the mobile phone and so forth,

the listener is contributing to the programme.

Robert's on the mobile - morning, Robert.

-Morning.

-Morning sir, how are you?

-Yeah, not too bad.

Trapped in this traffic since Junction 11 at the moment.

You'd get a genuine sense of almost a club, so that sense

of community is very real for people driving on their own.

I've come on at Junction 11, what I'm ringing up about is...

I'm between junctions 11 and 10, I've just past that big sign.

...caused because of the closure of the M1 southbound.

-Where do you need to be, David?

-Oh, I'm only going to Hemel Hempstead.

In this current era when there seems to be so much confusion about what Britishness is, I think

the British are the people who use the British motorways.

Quite clearly, you could define us solely as a motorway race

rather than an island race.

I'm on the road, I'm kind of in an engineering sort of sales situation where I'll

spend long periods in the car, so if I don't basically come into a place where it's busy it gets a bit...

life gets lonely.

We normally come to this service station about, ooh, two or three times a month.

We like coming here because the staff make a fuss of us,

there's a disabled loo which I can use, Lucy has a bit of exercise through the shop and through here,

the food's good and the general ambience is nice, they are pleased to see us.

And Lucy why - why do you like coming here?

I don't, particularly.

We've met some famous personalities while we've been here.

I had a chat with Andrew Flintoff at the beginning of the year,

I've met the owner of the British and Indian Museum here.

I've met people from Malaya here where I did my army service and I found I could still speak Malay,

I've met a Zulu who worked here, and generally speaking it's a nice little outing for us.

Good places to meet, not always for the best reasons.

Some quite sad things go on on our site, you know, I mean, it's not

uncommon actually for people to die on our sites.

They keel over with a heart attack from the stress of the journey, and that's, no, but it's a fact.

But you don't really want to get into that, do you?

Do you?

When you finally step out of your car and un-gum your nether garments from your sweaty limbs and walk into

the motorway service centres, you see a kind of unforced, collective lack of intimacy,

a mixing of social classes while nevertheless retaining their distance.

You're really witnessing a kind of microcosm of Britishness.

People always say, "Oh, if only our service stations could be like they are in France,"

where you get poached guinea fowl or boeuf bourguignonne -

it's delicious because the French would not eat the crap we eat.

And, and you think, well, yeah, that would be lovely,

but then you actually wonder if actually when it came down to it and you got to the Little Chef

and the man said, "Would you like the Duck a L'Orange?"

You'd actually feel a bit, no, actually I'd like the fried bread!

For us, it's part of being British.

It's pathetic but we'll never be able to shake that off.

I've been inspecting loos for the last seven years.

And I've been inspecting loos and assisting John for the past two years.

The marking system usually is on a one-to-five basis.

A three, four and five star is a pass, a one and two is a failure.

A three is a basic, does it work?

Is it providing a service?

Yes, it is. And then we go up, for instance, the old-fashioned pull chain, it functions.

A lever was an advancement on that, that would be a four star.

And this is a hands-free electronic sensor, this is the five star that we would be using now, it's top.

The atmosphere in the service station was absolutely amazing.

Even the toilet queue was a great social place those days, you know.

And God help some poor person who was caught short and wanted to get to the toilet quickly, because

there was kind of like 200 girls waiting in the loo queue to adjust their make-up and have a chat.

In the late '80s, the motorways enabled the explosion of a new sub-culture, rave.

Young people met in makeshift venues and danced wildly to music, described by the government

as "wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats."

1989 was a time of just fantastic parties.

Without the M25, the southern parties couldn't really have happened,

because a lot of them were called Orbital parties because they were on the Orbital Road.

The rave parties were borderline legal gatherings

of thousands of people determined to have a good time.

The police were determined to stop them.

A police officer monitors pirate radio stations to get

details of acid house parties being held this weekend.

To avoid detection, the party's secret location

would only be revealed at the last minute on telephone lines.

Would-be ravers gathered at service station pay phones,

ready to bomb down the motorway as soon as there was any news.

There would often be this crowd in the lobby, people queuing up to buy very cheap cups of hot chocolate.

Then going back to their cars, and every so often someone would come running out and shout a

message across the car park, or would simply come running out, drive off.

And, of course, as soon as a cluster of people got in cars, you'd just follow them.

I think it's Heston Services, we all followed someone back to a

nearby village and she was actually going back to change her jumper.

The party organisers relied on the motorways to deliver them thousands of ravers

before the police could arrive to stop the event happening.

And that was very much the cat and mouse game between the police and the party organisers.

Because if you're a 20-strong police force and you're trying

to get rid of, say, 5,000 kids who don't want to go, you're not going to be able to do it.

You're just gonna give up, do what you can about keeping the perimeter safe and let the party carry on.

Go and have your party, now be off, go on.

Yeah!

And eventually, what the police and the authorities decided to do was legalise all-night clubbing.

It took us that long to decide that, actually, it was OK to enjoy yourself in Britain after midnight.

So by then, the motorways had become very much a part of people travelling for a night out.

People travelling the sort of distance if you were used to

travelling in Spain or Italy or in America for a night out, but which we'd never done in Britain.

In Britain, like, before that you were restricted to whatever the night bus went.

As motorways lengthened the distance you could comfortably travel,

they had a profound effect on much of modern Britain.

You no longer had to live in a city just because you worked in one.

I'm tired of these surroundings. We're cooped up in this London flat all the days of our lives.

Well, then, let's go out into the country.

The English, historically, have never had a very strong attachment to the city or the town.

They've always had a yen for getting out to the country.

And once the motorways came, it was possible to go the whole hog and do what social surveys showed

people really wanted to do, even in the suburbs, and that is get out altogether into the open countryside.

And the paradigm for a motorway journey, I think, is to start in a large city, to access the motorway,

to come off the motorway onto an A road and then onto a B road and then onto an unlisted road, and finally

onto a rutted track that leads us to an adorable bosky little cottage in the dell with roses round the door.

And there is a sense of yearning for bucolia even in the heart of our motorway culture.

Kington Langley is a very pretty village indeed,

a most attractive environment, yet only a few minutes, four or five,

along the way from excellent road communications, via the M4 motorway.

Kington Langley was once a secluded village on the edge of the Cotswolds.

That all changed when Junction 17 of the M4 opened, a mere 1.8 miles away.

Invariably, people are coming down on the M4 motorway looking for a different pace of life,

I guess, and a village like this will very definitely fit the bill.

Equally, you're not cutting yourself off entirely, in as much as the accessibility via the motorway makes

employment to those areas that people have moved from still very, very feasible.

So they certainly come to live the dream here, without a shadow of a doubt.

House prices here probably average out at around about £500 - £600,000

and the marketplace here is very, very healthy.

It's altered the whole nature of Kington Langley.

Working-class people,

they just cannot afford the prices of the bigger houses in the village.

They've definitely been out-priced, because people living in the village now,

they use the motorway mostly to work at Bristol, Bath, Swindon

and also commute to London.

When we didn't have a motorway,

we had a very, very close community.

But since that has been for many years, I think it's altered and it's not the same,

it's not the same, especially during the week, those going out to London, etc,

well, they just eat, sleep and they just can't come in with the village during the week.

But this is a self-sufficient, closely-knit community.

Apples are grown, eggs laid, bread made, honey collected,

all with the belief that Worcester's farmers are second to none.

There's only one farm in the village now and

there's no work there, it's only just for two or three labourers.

But the commuter invasion wasn't all bad news for villages.

Many of them had been struggling to survive since the late 19th century.

Rural depression and the increasing mechanisation of farming had driven

people away from the country and into the cities in search of work.

All the rural counties were losing people to the cities, and what was

already happening even by the early 1960s that these same farmhouses and

little cottages that had been abandoned by the rural labouring poor were repopulated by the middle class

seeking either second homes or homes from which they could commute by the motorway system.

As far as surviving without motorways, no.

This village would be a dead village.

But motorways would also play a key role in sorting out

the problem of the urban poor trapped in crowded cities.

The post-war government had a plan for them.

After all, a vision of the future with superhighways had no place for slum housing.

The motorway era promised this, you know, drive out into Technicolor,

this drive out into a world of that kind of wonderful 1950s glamour,

but it was bright and colourful and cheerful,

and that's what it promised.

Britain was to be rebuilt, a new Jerusalem constructed, or at the very least, a few new towns.

Continuing his tour of the new towns, the Prime Minister

visited Stevenage and Harlow, in both of which the people live and work in the town.

The drudgery of commuting would be abolished.

Millions could leave the slums to experience the delights of

contemporary sculpture amongst other things,

and, crucially, every new town would be on a motorway.

Motorways and new towns were part of the same planning concept.

The motorways were needed to serve the new towns, because they were seen as industrial centres.

The motorways were therefore necessary

to supply the factories where most of these workers were supposed to work.

But, importantly, these towns were to be seen as self-contained.

People would live and work in them, they wouldn't need to commute, and

that was a very important part of the thinking.

The good people of Milton Keynes, Cumbernauld and Stevenage were all meant to stay firmly put.

But, of course, that didn't work.

The moment you've got a road, people use it, and we know that in Britain,

every time any road's built people flood onto it.

When you build a motorway it gets busy quickly, as if by force of nature.

So the new towns were always in a way undermined by their proximity to the motorway.

While many of the residents were happy to live in the new towns,

many of them were happy to work elsewhere.

There is, in planning, a law of unintended consequences, things never turn out as they were planned.

Today, the new town of Warrington in Cheshire has become commuter heaven.

Situated on the intersection of three motorways, almost a

third of Warrington's working population heads out every morning.

I live in Warrington and work in Manchester,

and use the M62 every morning to and from work.

If you asked me to go to some of the places around where I live,

I probably wouldn't be able to do it, but ask me to take you to Oxford

and you'd be fine.

Warrington's ideal, it's right in the middle of the motorway network, we've got the M62.

-The M56.

-The M6 to the east.

Which is one of the routes that I take on a regular basis.

So we can be in London within sort of three hours.

Brighton, which can be up to six hours journey.

We can get up to Glasgow within about three to three-and-a-half hours,

we go up there quite regularly.

I do quite enjoy the commute, I like the time on my own.

But I'm really starting to develop a bit of a weakness for teenage dance music at the moment.

I don't like other people using my car and that much.

It's very much a space for me to have my bits and bobs.

I'll buy chocolate and hide it in the glove compartment until my daughter gets in and tries to find it.

I love Italy, I love Italian food, I love Italian cars,

so I thought the next thing is gonna be I'll have to learn Italian.

And it's quite amusing when I'm driving along in the car,

particularly on a long journey, and there's people sat next to me and I'm giving it this, I'm

gesticulating as I'm driving along, and people think you're completely insane. But who cares?

It's my space, it's my car.

ITALIAN LANGUAGE TAPE PLAYS

I started trying to write stories in my head.

I actually started it when I was having a really bad day, and I was travelling up the motorway

and I just thought, "I don't want to go home, I just want to keep going."

And then it started to get me thinking, where would I go, what would happen?

And I started writing this story in my head about a fictional character that just continued on the motorway.

In my reverie, I saw the M40 as it will be some 20,000 years from now,

when the second Neolithic Age has dawned over Europe.

Still no services.

All six carriageways and the hard shoulder are grassed over.

Every single one of the distance markers, Birmingham 86, has been

crudely tipped to the horizontal, forming a series of steel byres.

On top of them are the decomposing corpses of motorway chieftains,

lain out for excarnation prior to interment.

You know, what the story proposes, in a way, is that motorways may be

our civilisation's greatest earthworks.

You know, that they may be what's left behind, what's most visible of our culture when it is declined.

Seems to me that our entire culture, if you like, is frozen, driving on the motorway of history,

believing fervently in its own destination that some kind of cosmic and spiritual service centre,

where the meals will turn out to be fantastic and the Travelodge will have great beds.

But the reality is, of course, that, like any other civilisation,

we're almost certainly doomed to some form of extinction.

The business parks and their relationship to the motorways

is where ideals of futurity of the late 20th century have finally crashed.

Since the 1970s and '80s, motorway junctions have been colonised by business parks.

The post-war search for the perfect living environment

has now become a search for the ideal work environment.

180 acres of supreme opportunity.

It's highly accessible by the motorway network,

so please come to Green Park.

The vision is simply to give people a stunning place to work

where people will be inspired by the architecture around them

and the environment outside the buildings as well as inside.

Bottom line is about maximising productivity, because there's an awful lot of

research that shows that productivity in corporates is maximised through people being happy where they work.

And we're trying to play our part in delivering that kind of development.

Just metres from the M4, Green Park is set to provide a working environment for 10,000 people.

As was once the vision for the new towns, the dream is for this to be a place you never have to leave.

It is ultimately our aim to absolutely deliver a state-of-the- art sustainable community here.

We're currently just about to submit plans for a community of just over 700 homes.

So what we've tried to do is bring on board all the other facilities

that we would normally find in a town centre.

So it's about creating choices, but it's always a challenge to influence people's behaviour through planning.

These fantasies of futuristic motorway communities

are the product of business rather than state planning.

In fact, business has always gone hand in hand with motorways.

These roads weren't built for leisure, but to serve manufacturing.

In Britain, the purpose of the motorways was to move traffic quickly, to create great trunk

routes for the movement of goods, primarily, between major cities.

The distribution of goods is key to the motorway network.

They were economic drivers and engines for the British economy,

and today you see that - they are the home of the gigantic lorry, the great truck that carries goods around.

-Thank you very much.

-Hello, mate.

How are you getting on? Have you been in a bit of traffic?

I'm stuck in the traffic on the M1 at the moment. So...

Are you? Right. Go on with it, mate.

If you can advise the customer.

Cool. Keep me informed. You have a caseload as well on the back of you, yeah?

Will do. If I get any other delays I'll give you a ring.

No worries, mate. I'll speak to you then.

-Aye, see you, Gaz.

-See you buddy. Ta-ta then.

-Ta-ta.

Everything you see round about you and everything you buy in the supermarkets is

brought to you on the lorry.

They are the lifeline of Britain.

I don't think...

people do realise how important the lorries are.

If all the lorries stopped in the yard for a week, Britain would come to a standstill.

Because there is now so little stock in the system, because products are moved long distances by road,

without road transport the shelves run bare,

the NHS is severely disrupted, manufacturing grinds to a halt.

Soon half the country's cars are off the road because they can't get fuel.

So, altogether life comes to an end within three or four days.

Best part of my working day is spent up and down the motorways all over the UK.

The cab is your home for the week and it's...

We're spending so much time away from home, Monday to Friday,

being a tramper means that you're spending all your life on the road.

You leave home on the Monday morning two o'clock, you could head up to Scotland and then reload Scotland,

back down to Cornwall, Cornwall across to Kent,

Kent back up to Scotland, Scotland back down to your base.

This is my three-pedals hotel.

A quarter of the trucks you pass on the road are carrying food and drink.

The supermarket has grown in tandem with the motorway network.

Now, one pound in every three spent on consumer goods in the UK goes into their tills.

In the '60s, what we would now see as

almost no choice at all would have seemed liked an awful lot of choice.

The rate of expansion has just gone on and on mushrooming,

for want of a better metaphor, and we don't know where it will end.

The typical superstore will now carry 20 to 25,000 product lines.

This would not be possible without the motorways constantly providing

fast and reliable deliveries from the distribution centres alongside them.

If you drive up British motorways today, you'll find at virtually every intersection these strange worlds.

These are the worlds of the distribution of goods,

the world of gigantic warehouses, the world of enormous great lorries.

Magna Park is the biggest in the UK, sited in a golden motorway triangle of the M1, M6 and M69.

It was developed in the late '80s by a venture partnership between Asda

and the Church of England's Pension Fund.

By investing quite heavily in distribution centres, the large retail chains have been

able to shift the stock from the shop into the warehouse, thereby releasing space in the shop for sales purposes.

It's also allowed the retailers to extend the range of products that they hold.

It's allowed them to channel the product through the system so much more rapidly, allowing them

to sell the goods to the public and get the public's cash before they have to pay their suppliers.

So there are a whole series of benefits, really, that have accrued

from centralising in distribution centres rather than having the suppliers deliver direct to the shop.

But there are pros and cons.

The average distance food travels in the UK has more than doubled since 1962.

This rise isn't just down to the HGV.

We're also travelling more to shop ourselves.

And the ultimate shopping experience, of course, is right next to a motorway.

After driving all them miles all week, I do tend to drive another 150 miles on a Saturday

to treat the wife to her shopping day out.

We travel mainly all over the country, could go anywhere to the main shopping centres.

Trafford Park in Manchester, Lakeside down near London, Bluewater, Cribbs Causeway.

It's something that my wife gets a lot of enjoyment out of, shopping, and I find it quite relaxing.

Plonk myself down outside Next with my magazine

and leave her to shop happily.

All roads lead today to Bluewater.

Bluewater is the biggest shopping mall in Britain at the moment

and of course in a few years it'll probably be one of the smallest.

Britain is a nation not of shopkeepers as such but of shoppers.

I mean, it's become a national disease, and I'm sure that many...

people in Britain love shopping and they live to shop.

But what's it done to the country?

Physically, certainly in terms of its architecture and its planning,

it's littered the landscape with

these enormous great gas-guzzling, air-conditioned stores, American-style or

Chinese-style warehouses which suck up masses of energy and they blast out lots of heat.

They're destroying the planet as much as the cars that use them.

Bluewater has 27 million visitors a year.

The product of a survey of over 20,000 people's shopping fantasies,

it is designed to exacting consumer requirements, and it aims to fulfil all of them.

I come to Bluewater at least twice a week, probably three times, but at least twice,

and if I'm here on my own I'm here for shopping,

generally speaking, or for a beauty treatment.

I come with my other half at least once a week and generally we come here to eat.

We've also been learning Spanish here at the Learning Centre, and then I would be here for...

the cinema - I come with a friend to the cinema - or for lunch or just to meet someone for coffee.

It's a relaxing place, an enjoyable place to be.

I wouldn't come here as often without motorways because the local roads are very narrow and very twisty,

and if the volume of people that use Bluewater were having to use the local roads it would be impossible.

Bluewater is straddled by two main motorways, the M20 and the M25,

so for Bluewater's success they're absolutely critical.

If they do stop running then we notice a downturn in feet.

We have people who will do a two-hour drive to get here who then may stay for 12 hours.

They'll maybe have a massage in the spa, they'll have an evening meal

and then they might take in a film at the cinema.

So the motorways are critical for us.

The catchment size is currently about ten-and-a-half million people.

It's a much pleasanter place to shop than a town centre.

It's definitely better - you're indoors, you can park under cover.

From when you leave your house you don't actually have to step out into

the elements, and while you're here shopping, I feel safer.

There are security people walking around.

The stores all have security systems in place and CCTV.

We have our own on-site police station which is fully manned at all times.

We have a full team of chaplains who are there very much to give pastoral care and help.

I have withdrawal symptoms If I don't come shopping here at least once a week.

Over the Christmas period, when it's so busy and we don't

tend to come as often I'm very, very, very keen to get back again.

I think I could be addicted to a lot worse things than Bluewater.

Bluewater's also part of the National Curriculum for geography,

so you regularly see very big groups of school children being

taken around the centre and looking at everything from the architecture through to the individual stores.

I think that the out-of-town shopping malls are a kind of logical

conclusion of the way that the motorway system has developed here.

The aspirational quality of the British motorways was built

on a consumer vision of a future that was powered by consumption.

The out-of-town shopping malls have arisen to gratify that as an outgrowth of the roadway,

and in all conscience that's where we should go.

Our lives are now spent much more on the tarmac than they were 30 or 40 years ago.

In a sense, the motorways form a kind of sticky network

of connections linking those separate parts of our lives.

Living without the motorways would be an absolute nightmare.

Can you imagine all the traffic trying to get through London that comes round this M25?

I certainly couldn't live without the motorways. I certainly couldn't work without the motorways.

I might be able to live but it would be living like a hermit.

Give me the motorways any day.

I agree there.

I suppose it's a form of democracy gone crazy.

I mean, where democracy seizes up, when you've got too many people

trying to do the same thing and to be democratic, as it were.

Everyone wants to be democratic, everyone wants equal rights on the road and you end up, of course,

with the 28 million cars which we have today all squashed up together.

In 1959, when the M1 opened, there were 2.8 million cars, so things have changed a little bit.

Next time we look at how we fell out of love with the motorway,

charting the rise of the road protest movement and the passions that were aroused.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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