Britain’s Changing Roadscapes

The book addresses long-standing geographical debates on place, place-attachment and kin/aesthetics as well as the unique spatial-temporal properties of ‘journeying’. Drawing upon the author’s road diaries and photographic archive dating back to the 1990s, the analysis centres on a route that runs from Scotland to Cornwall and which incorporates motorways, A-roads and unclassified country lanes. In addition to seeking to capture material evidence of change across a wide variety of road features and driving events - many of them transient, incidental and mundane - the book is also concerned with how change makes its presence known to the observer. This includes the question of how, and why, road-users sometimes develop powerful attachments for particular routes and roadside landmarks. To this end, the analysis is in conversation with recent debates in contemporary archaeology, the aesthetics of the everyday and geographical research on dis/orientation, as well as Henri Bergson’s foundational work on the phenomenology of perception and memory. And yet, it is the restless, teeming life of the British roads featured in the case studies - the A30, the A82, the M5, the M6, the M74 and Cornwall’s narrow, winding lanes - that makes this book memorable, especially given that, post-millennium, many of the changes to which it bears witness are epic in consequence. Congestion, electrification, automation, the arrival of SMART motorways and extreme weather events arising from climate change all feature here, alongside the disappearance of the roadside cafes, filling stations, phone boxes, lay-bys and snack bars associated with twentieth-century motoring.

This interdisciplinary exploration of Britain’s changing roads and roadscapes will appeal to academics and students working in, and across, the fields of social and cultural geography, mobilities studies, cultural history, literary and cultural theory and contemporary archaeology. Its autoethnographic case studies, historical route descriptions, photographic archive and general accessibility mean that it may also be of interest to road enthusiasts and the general reader.