A History of Inland Transport and Communication in England. Edwin A. Pratt
agreeable place to live in," and one where a "Man of Letters and Manners" would always "find suitable Society both to Divert and Improve himself," the town being, in fact, one of "very great Business and Trade, and yet full of Gentry, of Mirth, and of Good Company." King's Lynn, the head-quarters of so important a shipping business in those days, he found "abounding in very good company," while of York he writes: "There is abundance of good Company here, and abundance of good Families live here, for the sake of the good Company and cheap living; a Man converses here with all the World as effectually as at London; the Keeping up of Assemblies among the younger Gentry was first set up here, a thing other Writers recommend mightily as the Character of a good Country and of a Pleasant Place."
The general effect, from a social standpoint, of the combination of better roads and better coaches is well told in an essay "On the Country Manners of the Present Age," published in the "Annual Register" for 1761. The writer has much to say that is of interest from the point of view of the present work, but the following extracts must suffice:—
"It is scarce half a century since the inhabitants of distant counties were regarded as a species almost as different from those of the Metropolis as the natives of the Cape of Good Hope. … Formerly a journey into the country was considered almost as great an undertaking as a voyage to the Indies. The old family coach was sure to be stowed with all sorts of luggage and provisions; and perhaps in the course of the journey a whole village together with their teams, were called in to dig the heavy vehicle out of the clay, and to drag it to the next place of wretched accommodation which the road afforded. Thus they travelled like the caravan over the deserts of Arabia, with every disagreeable circumstance of tediousness and inconvenience. But now the amendments of the roads with the many other improvements of travelling have in a manner opened a new communication between the several parts of our island. … Stage-coaches, machines, flys and post chaises are ready to transport passengers to and fro, between the metropolis and the most distant parts of the Kingdom. The lover now can almost literally annihilate time and space, and be with his mistress before she dreams of his arrival. In short the manners, fashions, amusements, vices and follies of the metropolis now make their way to the remotest corners of the land as readily and speedily, along the turnpike road, as, of old, Milton's Sin and Death, by means of their marvellous bridges over the Chaos from the infernal regions to our world.
"The effects of this easy communication have almost daily grown more and more visible. The several great cities, and we might add, many poor country towns, seem to be universally inspired with the ambition of becoming the little Londons of the part of the country in which they are situated."
But if the easy communication rendered possible by turnpike roads and flying coaches conferred on the country towns a hope of becoming so many little Londons, the day was to come when a still easier communication by means of railway lines and express trains was to take provincial residents just as readily to the great and real London, and so deprive not a few provincial centres of much of that social life and distinction which the improved transport facilities had brought them.
In London itself, as may also be learned from Defoe, the betterment of the roads around the metropolis led to the citizens flocking out in greater numbers than ever to take lodgings and country houses in "towns near London," which many people having business in the City had not been able to do before because of the trouble involved in riding to and fro on the bad roads. We are told, further, of the consequent increase in the rent of houses, and of the greater number of dwellings being built, in places the roads to which had thus been improved, as compared with other suburban districts to which the turnpike system had not yet been extended.
We have here the beginnings of that creation of a Greater London which has since undergone such enormous developments, and has led to the almost complete disappearance of the custom, once in vogue in the City of London, of a merchant or tradesman living on the same premises as those in which he carried on his business.
Of the various circumstances that led to the eventual decline and fall of the turnpike system, which, with all its faults and short-comings, had at least helped to bring about the improvements in trade, transport and social conditions here described, I shall speak in Chapter xxiii.
CHAPTER XII
SCIENTIFIC ROAD-MAKING
One question which naturally arises in connection with the turnpike roads is, "Why was it, when there was so widespread an organisation of turnpike trusts, and when so much money was being spent on the repair of the roads, that the roads themselves were still so defective, and only relatively better than they had been before?"—this being the real position, notwithstanding the praises bestowed on the turnpike system by those who were gratified with the stimulus given to trade, travel and commerce by the improvements actually made.
The answer is that although a vast amount of road-making or road-repairing was going on, at the very considerable expense of the road users, and to the advantage of a small army of attorneys, officials and labourers, it was not road-making of a scientific kind, but merely amateur work, done at excessive cost, either with unintelligent zeal or in slovenly style, and yielding results which mostly failed to give the country the type of road it required for the ever-increasing traffic to which expanding trade, greater travel, and heavier and more numerous waggons and coaches were leading.
Before the adoption of scientific road-making, the usual way of forming a new road was, first to lay along it a collection of large stones, and then to heap up thereon small stones and road dirt in such a way that the road assumed the shape of the upper half of an orange, the convexity often being so pronounced that vehicles kept along the summit of the eminence because it was dangerous for them, especially in rainy weather, to go along the slope on either side.
This form of road was adopted in order to ensure good drainage for rain-water; and in this connection the writer on "Roads" in Postlethwayt's "Dictionary" (1745) says:—
"The chief and almost the only cause of the deepness and foulness of the roads is occasioned by the standing water which, for want of due care to draw it off by scouring and opening ditches and drains and other water courses, and clearing of passages, soaks into the earth, and softens it to such a degree that it cannot bear the weight of horses and carriages."
But the result of making roads in the shape of a semicircle was that the central ridge was speedily crushed down, and ruts were formed along the line of traffic passing over the loose materials used. These ruts, again, defeated the purpose of the original high convexity by becoming troughs for the retention of rain and mud, the latter being rendered worse with each fresh churning up it received from the wheels of waggon or stage-coach.
The road-maker thus required to be speedily followed by the road-repairer; and his method of procedure has been already indicated in Arthur Young's description of the road to Wigan, where he says, "The only mending it receives is the tumbling in some loose stones, which serve no other purpose but jolting a carriage in the most intolerable manner."
The mending of hundreds of miles even of turnpike roads had never gone any further than this. There was no cohesion in collections of loose stones, mainly in their natural and more or less rounded form, and the expectation that they would be crushed and consolidated into a solid mass by extra-broad waggon wheels, in accordance with Acts of Parliament in that case made and provided, remained unfulfilled. The stones were simply displaced and thrown aside by the traffic, the inevitable ruts reappearing in due course; while, as the rainwater passed readily through them, the roads became elongated reservoirs of water in rainy weather, and were most effectively broken up by frost in winter.
It was from conditions such as these that Thomas Telford and John Loudon McAdam came to rescue the country.
There had been one road-reformer before them, in John Metcalf, a native of Knaresboro', where he was born in 1717. Though totally blind from the age of six, he developed abundant resources, and became successively fiddler, soldier, chapman, fish-dealer, horse-dealer and waggoner. Taking at last to road-making, he constructed about 180 miles of road in Yorkshire,