The cultural geographies of road and rail in inter-war England

The cultural geographies of road and rail in inter-war England:
a study in the cultural history of transport

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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Introduction: the routes to a new England

IN 1935 B.T. BATSFORD published Ivor Brown’s The Heart of England in their successful ‘British Heritage’ series of books. At the beginning of his introductory chapter, Brown set out to summarize what he perceived as some significant contemporary trends in English life by creating a concise, complex and many-layered piece of imagery around the notion of the road:

The significant feature of English life today is its mobility. It is true that we rush ourselves to death upon the roads whose control has become a major concern of Government. But we do also carry ourselves upon these same roads to better housing, better health, new and diverse pleasure, and wider knowledge and enjoyment of our country.[1]

Brown here reads into the image of the road a set of significances which, taken together, add up to nothing less than a statement of the condition of England. Questions of central government authority, social and cultural mobility, improvements in housing and welfare, new leisure and educational opportunities, and freedom to engage with, explore and understand England itself, are all seen to revolve around the central image of the road. Brown's routes to a new England promise freedom and lead to a better future, but travel along them demands responsibility and discipline. Roads were points of admission to the landscape and modes of traversing it; they were conduits for the ‘wider knowledge and enjoyment of our country’, and constituted structures for the creation of new forms of citizenship which would contain the freedoms of the new mobility. Roads allowed a balance of leisure and education and provided a framework for access, exploration, interpretation and understanding.

During the inter-war years the English landscape was contested territory both literally and metaphorically, an arena of claim and counter-claim in terms of responsibility, citizenship, exploitation, and aesthetic understanding. Most discussion of landscape during this period reflected the subject of its discourse by structuring itself around modes of entry and traverse and focusing on the infrastructure of transport, above all the novel conditions perceived to have been created by the rise of motor transport and the development of the road network. This essay considers some aspects of these inter-war English cultural geographies, looking at perceptions of transport networks in theorizations of landscape and land-use. In doing so it is indebted to recent scholarship in this area, most notably the work of David Matless,[2] but it seeks to pursue a different intellectual trajectory by focusing on perceptions of road and rail transport and relating them to each other and to the wider context of cultural attitudes to landscape which Matless has charted.

Road and rail in context

This was a period in which the railways increasingly felt the effects of road competition. Between 1918 and 1938 the number of private motor cars registered in Britain rose from just over 100,000 to over 2 million.[3] The immediate post-war period also saw a steep rise in the numbers of buses and coaches in Britain, rising from just over 5,000 in 1914 to over 50,000 in 1923, and reaching a peak of nearly 99,000 in 1925; thereafter the numbers remained consistently around the 50,000 level until the Second World War.[4] The railways were well aware of what one railway guide book called ‘the great and ever-growing competition of motor transport by road’,[5] and recognised that the dynamics of travel were changing and that the railways would have to adjust to the new situation:

For the purposes of leisure it may be doubted whether [the railways] will ever again become the indispensable resources they once were ... But even this development will probably adjust itself in time, and railway and charabanc and motor-car, working in common, will bring about a still greater vogue for travel and sightseeing and residence in the rural districts, that will more than make up for the motor’s invasion of the railway’s former monopoly.[6]

Yet, as the relatively optimistic tone of this observation suggests, particularly in its stress on inter-modal co-operation, it is important not to see the ‘decline of the railways’ as the whole of the story during this period. There has been a tendency in modern scholarship to take contemporaries’ perceptions of the railways as a transport system in decline as a licence to write them out of the picture and focus on the roads as if they were an autonomous phenomenon existing outside a context significantly shaped by other transport modes. Thus David Matless’s recent analysis of inter-war motor travel writing[7] does not give sufficient consideration to the contemporary importance, in terms both of stylistic and formal influence and dominance in the market place, of the substantial travel literature produced by the railways before and during the period in question.[8] If it is remembered that, for example, the Great Western Railway alone ran some 25,000 excursions each year in the mid-1930s,[9] and that copies of GWR travel books such as The Cornish Riviera, Glorious Devon and the annual Holiday Haunts publication were selling out editions of 200,000 copies each year in the same period,[10] then it is clear that the contribution of the railway deserves more attention than it has perhaps received, and that comparative perceptions of road and rail during this period should not be solely determined by the latter’s supposed decline in relation to the former. The railways remained a significant factor shaping cultural perceptions of landscape throughout the inter-war years.

Transport and the geographies of urban/rural transition

Among the most important inter-war perceptions of the English landscape was that in both urban and rural forms it was threatened by the aesthetic and moral chaos associated with certain conditions of modern life: new means of transport, uncontrolled urban growth, a range of ‘mass’ cultural forms and activities. A widespread reaction was to seek structures – cultural, social, economic, political – which were capable of imposing and sustaining order in the landscape. In this struggle between order and chaos the front line was seen as neither urban nor rural, but as the zone of transition between the two. The ultimate sign of chaos, argued the town planner Thomas Sharp in 1932, was a dissolving of oppositions and distinctions, above all the distinction between town and country:

The one age-long certainty, the antithesis of town and country, is already breaking down ... The strong, masculine virility of the town; the softer beauty, the richness, the fruitfulness of that mother of men, the countryside, will be debased into one sterile, hermaphroditic beastliness. The crying need of the moment is the re-establishment of the ancient antithesis. The town is town: the country is country: black and white: male and female.[11]

This blurring of distinctions was most prominent in the phenomenon of suburban sprawl, which for Sharp was ‘Vague, wasteful, formless, incoherent’, its ‘town’ qualities no more than ‘a straggling disorderly alternation of unrelated buildings and unrelated vicinities’, the ‘country’ part ‘a childish sham’.[12] As Gordon Cherry and more recently David Matless have pointed out,[13] Sharp was in many ways untypical in his rejection of the low-density mix of urban and rural which characterized the influential ‘garden city’ model as it was understood in the inter-war years; but he was entirely representative in his rhetorical positioning of town and country as ‘settlement fundamentals under threat from urban decentralization and rural disintegration’.[14]

In his Town Planning, published in 1940, Sharp suggested that ‘“Planning for the Transport Age” has become a catchword for every planner who would be regarded as modern,’ and ‘whether it has become a catchword or not, [it] is obviously the proper ideal for to-day’.[15] The notion of mobility was central to the new ‘Transport Age’, yet the spread of this universal suburbia in place of town and country nullified the advantages of the new transport developments and threatened the identity and integrity of both rural and urban landscape:

But even if we cannot bring beauty back to the town, it would surely still be more sensible to maintain the old sharp physical distinction between town and country ... For the maintenance of the sharp dramatic contrast, the emphatic physical distinction between these two antithetical forms is of the very greatest value in promoting the happiness of the inhabitants of a country so heavily populated as England is. The thrill of passing from one to the other is one of the oldest and most fundamental excitements that civilized man has known.[16]

For Sharp, the phenomenon of ‘Neither-Town-Nor-Country’[17] marked an erosion of the urban/rural distinction and the transformation of the landscape from a space based upon hierarchy and differentiation into an undifferentiated chaos: ‘a new utility for living that is to replace two old utilities of town and country’, ‘sacrificing the invaluable dramatic contrast of the two old utilities for one simple neutrality’.[18] In this context the reason for Sharp’s concern with transport, and the prominence of transport in the wider context in which his writings are located, is clear. Systems of transport link the urban and the rural, literally and metaphorically, and the journey between the two across increasingly blurred zones of transition marked an exploration of the processes at work in creating this new, equivocal, urban/rural landscape. For those concerned with the social and cultural geographies of English landscape during the inter-war years, whether planners, journalists, travel writers, novelists or politicians, new patterns of mobility and changes in transport technology and their consequences constituted one of the foremost issues with which they found it necessary to engage.

New conditions of transport: perceptions of rail and road

The ‘new conditions of transport’ with which Sharp was concerned were above all related to the expansion of the use of motor vehicles, and thus with the roads of England rather than with the rails. The railway had been associated with an expansion of towns, but, Sharp and others argued, had not essentially changed the ‘traditional compact character of the town’ or the basic distinction and relationship between town and country:

Even when the railways came and made it possible to live away from one’s place of business, the necessity of getting to the fixed point, the station, where one could join the railway, still made it desirable that one’s new town or suburb or whatever it was should be reasonably compact, grouped about that station. And anyhow the railways were miles apart and the great areas of country between their lines were largely unaffected by them.[19]

For Sharp and many of his contemporaries the railway was largely perceived as a problem left over from a previous age rather than as an asset to be developed and used to best advantage. The origins of this view of the railway as superseded lay in the early twentieth century. The railways had always had their critics but after 1900 an increasingly numerous and influential body of opinion argued that the fundamental characteristics of the railway system were inflexibility and obsolescence and that its best years were over. For H. G. Wells, writing in 1901, ‘a steam engine running upon a railway’ was the quintessential symbol of the nineteenth century, the century that was now past; he condemned the railways as obsolete, restrictive, inefficient, amounting to ‘really only a vast system of trains of horse-waggons and coaches drawn along rails by pumping-engines on wheels’, and saw the future of transport lying with great networks of modern highways carrying motorised traffic.[20] The poet John Davidson was of the same generation as Wells, and, like him, writing at the threshold of the automobile age, saw the railways as the obsolete relics of an archaic and primitive era. ‘That railways are inadequate appears / Indubitable now’ wrote Davidson in 1907, seeing them as symbolic of a dying civilization:

The railway was the herald and the sign,
And powerful agent in the swift decline
Of Europe and the West.
The future sage
Will blame sententiously the railway age,
Preachers upon its obvious vices pounce,
And poets, wits, and journalists pronounce
The nineteenth century in prose and rhyme
The most unhappy period of time.[21]

Davidson saw the railway as the embodiment of ugly, mediocre, mass-society nineteenth-century civilization, dominated by the ‘mob’: ‘Class, mass and mob for fifty years and more / Had all to travel in the jangling roar / Of railways, the nomadic caravan / That stifled individual mind in man’.[22]

By the inter-war years, this critique had become commonplace, reflecting the association of the railways with the old technology, old industry, and old society of the Victorian era. This perception can be found in Clough Williams-Ellis’s influential England and the Octopus, published in 1928. For Williams-Ellis, the age of the railway was over and the rise of road transport represented a process of ‘revenge and reversal’ as ‘concrete, rubber and petrol ... turn[ed] the tables on steam and steel’.[23] Williams-Ellis ranked the railways among the villains destroying the character of England, but saw them as by no means the worst, and their faults were those of the age which had created them as much as their own: ‘In their youthful exuberance and adolescent years of growth, as also in their prosperous maturity, the British railways did many things of which in their rather harassed old age they are no doubt properly ashamed’.[24] An important section of England and the Octopus is the fable of ‘Castle Malory’, a historic English town whose aesthetic degradation over the previous century stands for the processes which, Williams-Ellis believed, were threatening the character of the English landscape and English civilisation. The railway, he argued, had begun the town’s decline when it approached the town in such a way as to deny its citizens ‘their direct and immemorial access to the sea’, ‘truncating the estuary itself and hindering up-river traffic, as well as destroying the famous view’ – a synthesis of aesthetic, economic and social damage.[25] The imposition of the railway on the town disrupted its natural geography, replacing an open topography of picturesque town, river, quays and sea with an ugly, sordid railway landscape. Just as for Sharp in 1940 the journey between town and country becomes emblematic of the degeneration of both, so the approach to Castle Malory is used to dramatise the extent of its fall from grace:

Now, after passing two or three dismal little works that have failed and a peppering of squalid little houses huddling between the railway embankment and the water’s edge, you enter the town between its twin malodorous guardians, the gasometers and the sewage works.[26]

This description of the destruction of the clear transition between town and country dramatizes the breaking down of distinctions associated with the laissez-faire attitudes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, Ivor Brown wrote in 1935 that in the industrial towns of the north ‘There is no dignified approach to the centre of things’[27] because of the ‘Victorian mess’ surrounding them, and argued that ‘The Victorian mess abides. By our toleration of ribbon-development along main roads we are ourselves preparing the mess of to-day and to-morrow’.[28]

Such environmental degradation was not the result of a deliberate policy; rather, it was a product of ill-considered, short-term decisions. The construction of the railway to Castle Malory so that the town was cut off from the sea, the ugliness and unfortunate location of the railway station, the tendency of the railway to attract inappropriate and unsuccessful economic enterprises in place of the town’s ‘immemorial’ economic basis, its relationship with the sea – none of these things were deliberately imposed upon the town as part of a plan. Indeed, there was no plan of any kind, and that was precisely the problem with the nineteenth-century industrial society symbolised by the railway: it was unplanned, a dirty, wasteful, uncoordinated, irresponsible mess.

For many in the 1920s and 30s the railway was just another aspect of the ‘Victorianism’ against which they felt themselves to be reacting. By 1934 J. B. Priestley was distinguishing nineteenth-century England, ‘the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways’ from the contemporary England ‘of arterial and by-pass roads’,[29] and felt justified in writing that ‘We thought the railway system would last for ever, and it is dying now’.[30] Osbert Sitwell articulated this view with characteristic pungency when he remarked in 1935 that for him trains summed up ‘all the fogs and muddled misery of the nineteenth century. They constitute, in fact, so many slums on wheels’.[31] The clearance of brick slums from the towns and cities of England was becoming a rallying cry for those who wanted to create a better, cleaner, more orderly nation; if the railway was nothing more than a mobile slum, then there was clearly little hope for it.

Earlier in the century Ebenezer Howard had seen railways as integral to his plan for the cleaner, greener city of the future. In Garden Cities of To-morrow the railways performed a vital function in carrying the traffic of his new towns and cities with the minimum of waste, delay, and disruption to the surrounding environment. The ‘factories, warehouses, dairies, markets, coal yards, timber yards, etc.’ of the new model cities were all to be connected to a circular railway encompassing the whole town and connected to the main line:

This arrangement enables goods to be loaded direct into trucks from the warehouses and workshops, and so sent by railway to distant markets, or to be taken direct from the trucks into the warehouses or factories; thus not only effecting a very great saving in regard to packing and cartage, and reducing to a minimum loss from breakage, but also, by reducing the traffic on the roads of the town, lessening to a very marked extent the cost of their maintenance.[32]

Howard’s garden cities would also be served by ‘rapid railway transit’, using ‘an inter-municipal railway’ connecting the towns which would ring the central metropolis, and another system of railways connecting each town with this ‘Central City’, thus providing the citizens of this group of cities with ‘a railway system and not a railway chaos to serve their needs’.[33] Improved railways were an intrinsic part of Howard’s scheme – he could not conceive of the road system alone being adequate to the needs of the cities of the new era – but they were to be railways freed from the inadequacies inherited from their unplanned, irrational origins and development in the nineteenth century:

... are the people of England to suffer for ever for the want of foresight of those who little dreamed of the future development of railways? Surely not. It was in the nature of things little likely that the first network of railways ever constructed should conform to true principles; but now, seeing the enormous progress which has been made in the means of rapid communication, it is high time that we availed ourselves more fully of those means ...[34]

It was usual for twentieth-century planners to castigate the lack of foresight and planning inherent in the nineteenth-century development of the railway network. ‘If there had been any planning one hundred years ago’, observed Paul Cadbury in Birmingham – Fifty Years On (1952), ‘when New Street was built and the Great Western Railway tunnel was excavated under Corporation Street, one central station would have been both practicable and exceedingly convenient’.[35] Railway development in Britain took place under laissez-faire conditions of commercial competition and minimal regulation; certainly there was an absence of anything that might be considered as planning. Not surprisingly a later age increasingly attracted by the claims of planning found this deeply unamenable, but also regarded it as among the sins of a former age, open to remedy and certainly not as threatening as the sins of the present, associated above all with the road network and its users.

There was, therefore, a degree of ambivalence about the railway in the minds of those concerned with planning away the evils of ugly towns and a desecrated countryside. On the one hand, the railway was inextricably associated with the processes of industrialization, urban growth, and the unplanned private enterprise civilization of the nineteenth century which was to blame for so much which informed mid-twentieth century opinion found deplorable. The railway could be blamed for allowing ugly suburbs and vulgar seaside resorts to expand, bringing the town into the country and contributing to the creation of the modern civilization of the urbanised masses which had led to the cinema, the motor car, ribbon development and suburban ‘villa-dom’. Yet the railway’s sins were committed a long time ago; the effects of many of them had been mellowed by time; by the inter-war years the railways were clearly in decline; and in any case their impact upon the landscape and upon society at large was of a very different nature to that associated with roads and suburban sprawl.

In 1910 E. M. Forster had commented in Howard’s End that the Great North Road, accompanying the railway northwards out of London, was ‘more suggestive of infinity than any railway’ but found the nature of the freedom associated with the road questionable as it ‘awaken[ed], after a nap of a hundred years, to such life as is conferred by the stench of motor-cars, and to such culture as is implied by the advertisements of anti-bilious pills’.[36] The trouble with the road was that, unlike the railway, it was a focus for many uncoordinated energies, an unregulated rather than a regulated channel. ‘We may say without exaggeration’, commented one authority in 1940, ‘that the motor has vulgarised the entire country’.[37] The road could be seen as a conduit for vulgarity and degeneration; in his English Journey, J. B. Priestley used the image of such a road to suggest the tawdry future into which ‘everything and everybody’ was being swept: ‘one dusty arterial road of cheap mass production and standardised living’.[38] The landscape of the English road, complained C. E. M. Joad in 1938, was composed of ‘staring villas, bungalows, hoardings, petrol pumps, and notice boards’;[39] ‘Chaos at the Crossroads’ was the Architectural Review’s summary of the problem, as quiet country roads became traffic-filled jumbles of uncoordinated clutter.[40] In the buildings that quickly grew up along the roadsides, lamented Clough Williams-Ellis, ‘there is nothing at all noble or satisfying. Whether bungalows or garages, tea-shops or villas, their nastiness is assured’.[41] The railways, however, ‘are at least free of this reproach, and mostly traverse the very heart of rural England’.[42]

The road as a principle of order

Part of the reaction against ugly, degenerative roads took the form of a desire for roads which could partake, at least in part, of the character of railways: forming part of unified system, coordinated, regulated, systematic. Seen in this light, the autostradas of fascist Italy and, above all, the autobahns of Nazi Germany could be viewed in a very positive light – a stance that had political implications, whether acknowledged or not, as David Matless has observed:

While it would be absurd to equate autobahn admiration with fascism, it would be equally absurd to ignore the intimations of cultural and political authority present in these road discussions. If preservationists argued that the state of the landscape was a reflection of the state of the nation, if they stressed ordered progress under new authority, it they sought to make a moral landscape through national planning, then they could not view the autobahn as a non-political road.[43]

If the nation was conceived of as a biological organism, the provision of an advanced circulatory system with the development of a bold system of national highways could be seen as in accordance with the dictates of evolutionary progress. ‘The athlete’ argued Geoffrey Boumphrey in 1939, ‘has need of a better circulation than the sedentary worker’.[44] The bold sweep of the wide new motor road was thus an intoxicating symbol of progress, modernity and clarity, in a way in which an ageing steam-powered railway could never be; it was cleanly geometrical and uncompromising, regulated and efficient; it was not confused and messy but respected distinction and hierarchy; it could be viewed as democratic and yet it embodied authority. Completely new road systems in rural areas, free of such complications, retained their aesthetic allure, an aesthetic of purpose and order: ‘There is surely something rather noble’, argued Clough Williams-Ellis, ‘about the broad white concrete ribbons laid in sweeping curves and easy gradients across the country’.[45] There was also the practical point that a completely new system of roads would not require the rebuilding of existing roads and the accompanying destructive effects upon their character and the adjacent landscape. There was concern that the improvement of roads was leading to an unacceptable cost in aesthetic terms. The authorities charged with maintaining and developing the road system could be starkly unapologetic over this issue; in 1939 a publication produced on behalf of the English county councils remarked:

Some of our bridges have been landmarks for centuries, and are noted for their beauty; but the ruthless demands of modern traffic require the substitution of others more suited to the needs of the present day. The County authorities have again and again to decide whether the old and beautiful shall be retained or the new needs be met; only rarely is it possible to combine the two.[46]

Patrick Abercrombie argued in 1938 for new trunk roads and against the rebuilding of existing roads into a uniform network under the auspices of the Ministry of Transport, observing that ‘a universal enlargement of existing main roads’ would amount to ‘a system of planning by decree instead of according to local requirements’; but despite this apparent rejection of centralized planning he went on to argue for the construction of ‘a few completely new roads, on the model of the autostrade of Italy’.[47]

Behind such arguments lay one of the most enduring concerns of town and country planning in twentieth-century Britain, the segregation of different kinds of traffic. H. G. Wells had argued at the beginning of the century that the ‘segregation of motor traffic’ from other traffic was essential to the establishment of new trunk routes dedicated to high-speed motorized traffic, and ‘may begin even in the present decade’.[48] He foresaw ‘the new wide roads ... here cutting through a crest and there running like some colossal aqueduct across a valley’, filled with ‘a multitudinous traffic of bright, swift (and not necessarily ugly) mechanisms’.[49] Wells even suggested that some railways would ‘hasten to replace their flanged rolling stock by carriages with rubber tyres, remove their rails, broaden their cuttings and embankments, raise their bridges, and take to the new ways of traffic’.[50] Much bulk freight would remain with the railways, but where passenger, parcel and light goods traffic could migrate to the new motor roads it would surely do so. The traffic systems of the twentieth century would thus become more specialized, dedicated, and ordered. It is hardly surprising to note that the railways were rather less committed to this concept than Wells might have wished. When in 1923 the privately-run (but partly state-funded) ‘Northern and Western Motor Way’ was proposed between London and the north-west of England, The Railway Gazette noted that ‘it is impossible to conceive that the railways would remain quiescent in the face of such a menace to their interests’.[51] Pointing out that the road would pass through an area already ‘well served by railways’, the journal went to observe that the motorway scheme was founded on the basis that ‘the newcomers desire to provide facilities only for the better paying classes of traffic’ (precisely the classes which Wells foresaw migrating to his new motor roads). Traffic such as coal or iron ore would ‘without doubt, remain to the railways in order that they may endeavour to secure the present return of 1d. per ton per mile’, while the new road would carry traffic such as ‘say, a large consignment of groceries, upon which the railways might earn 5¾d. per ton per mile were they permitted to carry it’.[52] For the railways such roads were not improvements to the nation’s circulatory system but parasitical intrusions; as the Great Western Magazine argued, also with the Northern and Western Motor Way in mind, in 1924, ‘Any partial success which might be attained by the scheme would be mainly secured from traffic diverted from contiguous railways’.[53]

A network of such bold new roads was suitable for open country, and Williams-Ellis and other supporters of such a development always visualised these English autostradas in an empty landscape of English hills and valleys; but any similarly bold plan for road-building in an urban environment, even if the argument in terms of improving and diverting traffic flow could be accepted as sound, tended to be regarded far less favourably. In 1938 Thomas Sharp condemned the plan for a new road through Durham running ‘half a mile through the ancient city with as much regard for its features as a railway track’.[54] Such roads combined the worst features of rail and road in their lack of engagement with the surrounding townscape and the scale of their intrusion; in the context of the established (as opposed to new-built) urban environment they were another contribution to chaos – ‘creat[ing] a murderous traffic crossing at the very centre of the existing congestion’[55] – rather than an ordering, clarifying principle.

Country lanes and initiate landscapes

At one end of the range of English roads, both actual and metaphorical, lay the English autobahn; at the other, the country lane. In 1926 the nature writer Anthony Collett suggested that the rural lane was a fundamental structural member of England, ‘form[ing] boundaries so old as to show plainly that they are not the footpaths of yesterday’.[56] Collett described one ‘rough cart-track’ which has ‘long ceased to exist as a connected route, even of the humblest kind’ but which nevertheless forms ‘part of the boundary between Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, which was defined in Saxon times’.[57]

Wherever in our walks between village and village we find a track utterly overgrown and deserted, a sanctuary of butterflies and adders, then we may be fairly sure that it was of importance when most modern highways were quagmires ...[58]

Collett argues that the real, historically-rooted England to be found down such lanes is not accessible to the modern motorised tourist: ‘it is by following their covert windings, and not by rushing along new coach-roads, or still newer motor-roads, that we often discover the finest specimens of local architecture, and the seats of old legend’.[59]

H. V. Morton’s In Search of England is full of lanes; ‘I suppose many a man has stood at his window above a London square in April hearing a message from the lanes of England’,[60] muses Morton before setting off ‘into a green tunnel of a lane, with England before me’[61] at the beginning and ending among ‘Warwickshire lanes, deep and banked’.[62] In between he finds himself in a ‘tangle of up-and-down lanes’ in Hampshire and ‘the darkest tunnel of a lane’ in Cornwall, follows the ‘narrow, flagged lanes’ of a little Wiltshire town, and becomes utterly lost in a lane in deepest Norfolk (among many others).[63] Morton’s work typified what has been called the ‘motorist-led discovery of rural England’[64] which was based upon the independence and freedom of the motor car. The motoring paradigm was not unchallenged, however. The railways’ publicity also exploited the imagery of the country lane, in posters and in their holiday literature, and implied a very different model of discovery. The viewpoint adopted in the cover illustration for Morton’s In Search of England is elevated and panoramic; the landscape is laid open for what C. E. M. Joad called the ‘motor’s capacity for ubiquitous penetration’,[65] with the unimpeded ribbon of road leading the all-penetrating gaze of the motorized sightseer through a variegated landscape of river, fields, villages and woods. In railway posters such as the Great Western Railway’s ‘Marlborough for Downs & Forest’, designed by W. E. Leadley in 1927 and ‘Go Great Western to Cornwall’ of 1933 by Edward McKnight Kauffer, or the Southern Railway’s ‘The South Downs’ of 1946 by Walter E. Spradbery,[66] a very different and much more controlled perspective is adopted, in which elements of the landscape reveal themselves according to their own agenda; and the lane, while leading the visitor in, offers a mystery to be unlocked by the initiate visitor rather than an open realm to be surveyed and freely moved through.

In opposition to the motor-car perspective of Morton and Priestley, in which country roads and lanes were a matrix through which the independent motorized observer could move at will, railway company publicity stressed the advantage of being taken by rail straight to the heart of the country, where the lanes and by-ways awaited exploration. The beauties of such landscapes could not be seen ‘by motoring or rushing through it’ but needed ‘careful preparation and humble entry on foot’.[67] This is a model of respectful, responsible citizenship[68] rather than individualistic exploitation. The author of a 1935 article on the Cotswolds from the Great Western Magazine depicts an ‘unknown land hidden away from main roads and petrol fumes’, and in terms similar to those used to describe the initiate nature of Collett’s country-lane England, argues that the true beauty and enchantment of the Cotswolds is simply not available to the motorist:

Life in the Cotswolds is peaceful. Its quiet culture and harmonious beauty can only be taken in long, slow draughts, and not gulped at fifty miles an hour ... travel by rail to the fringe of the Cotswolds and then go quietly through the peaceful lanes with no thought of anything so soul-destroying as a mileage schedule.[69]

The railways consciously created an alternative vision of rural England to that of the motorist and the motor road, in which visitors were to be initiated into the properties of landscape and place through ‘communion and encounter’ and move through the landscape according to the itinerary of pilgrimage, guided by a ‘received protocol of participation’, rather than by the individualized, motorised mileage schedule.[70]

Road travel brought initiate, exclusivist perspectives into conflict with ideas of freedom and the individual enterprise of travel. For C. E. M. Joad, discussing ‘Road Provision’ in 1938, segregational strategies were one solution, with motor traffic ‘canalized’ in order that ‘some roads, or, as I should prefer them to be, lanes, may be left to the non-motoring townsman’:

where he can be assured of peace and quiet, where he need not go constantly in fear of life and limb, where he can see the sights and hear the sounds of nature, where he can, if he feels disposed, recline on a bank of wild flowers, smell their scent and hear the songs of birds, and where the natural surface of the soil is allowed to appear uncovered by a coat of monotonous tarmac.[71]

It is the ‘townsman’ who is Joad’s concern, rather than the country dweller; elsewhere he argues that ‘the claim of the farmer should ... yield to that of the townsman’.[72] The countryside is conceived as a recreational and educational resource for the urban population. Furthermore, Joad wants to exclude a large section of the urban population from enjoyment of the countryside (or at least, enjoyment on their own, motorised, terms) in order to protect the democratic rights of access and enjoyment of others: ‘Whatever be the claims of townsmen in relation to the countryside, they are not yet ready or able to exercise their rights without damaging that to which they lay claim’.[73] Joad’s suggestion is that a nationwide classification of roads should be imposed which echoed the classification of railway lines for particular sorts of traffic, with certain roads scheduled ‘as railway lines are scheduled, for motorists only, and from all others I would exclude them’.[74] Joad is thus putting forward what he perceives as the ordered, systematic nature of the railway network as a model for the road system, as the only alternative to the chaotic free-for-all, with its costs of environmental degradation and the destruction of moral landscape, which he sees as threatened by modern developments.

Conclusion: mobility, democratisation and citizenship

The motor car brought a new dimension to the enjoyment of the countryside which was recognised as a democratisation. This democratisation in its good and bad effects was symbolised in the new roads and the leisure and catering facilities which became associated with them. The inn attracted attention because of its importance in tradition and the transformation which the motor age had wrought in its fortunes. ‘The invention of the railways and the growth of their great systems left the roadway Inns to desultory neglect’, observed no less a figure than Edwin Lutyens in his foreword to Batsford’s The Old Inns of England (1934), but the rise of motoring had led to their renaissance as ‘the giant growth of motors and of motorists has brought our old roads, and the Inns adorning them, into a renewed existence’. This development had its unfortunate side, however, as the new roads demanded a new type of hostelry: the roadhouse, described by one writer as ‘a species of sportive hotel which grew up along the new motoring roads and caters especially for the bright young person in the gaudy little car ... Their gaiety runs to garishness; in the baser type of Road House one meets the new paganism in its flashiest form’.[75] Lutyens likewise deplored the new roadhouses, as much for their associations with tawdry falsity as for what he saw as their ugliness:

Much good work is being done, but there are regrettable exceptions, such as the adjectival ‘olde worlde’ creations, which are as objectionable and as needless as are the ultra-modern, in that both deface our countryside.It is not possible to replace or displace old traditions in the twinkling of an eye. Tradition is quite admirably shown in this book.[76]

The Batsford volume on inns sets out, from its opening paragraphs, to educate a newly mobile public on the meanings and values inherent in this historically-rooted and culturally distinct phenomenon; it sets out to educate the traveller on the nature of authenticity and the ways in which the English inn can be read as a symbol of itself and of the nature of England itself. Those not prepared to absorb the appropriate lessons and be guided by the necessary cultural protocols are warned off at the beginning of ‘The Inn and the Road’, the first chapter: ‘If ... you use the roads just as a means of transit from one town to another: if you really think that sham medieval beams on the outside of a large and obviously new public-house are preferable to no decoration at all ... then you have no business to have read this book beyond the opening paragraphs’.[77] The same didactic purpose is at work in the final chapter, ‘Some Notes on Touring, with a Selected List of Notable Inns’, which advises the traveller that ‘a tour needs general if not detailed planning’[78]and that ‘to wander in search of old inns’ does not mean ‘that their wares should be sampled in wholesale fashion’.[79] Rather, ‘interesting and original tours’ should be worked out using ‘the Bartholomew’s half-inch to the mile coloured maps’ for general touring and ‘the one-inch coloured large sheet series of the Ordnance Survey’ for ‘close work on by-lanes and footpaths’.[80] This book can thus be seen as part of a process of developing and disseminating a new code of citizenship, not just for the motoring public, but for society at large, the society that encouraged the building of modern roadhouses characterised by the ugliness and fakery of ‘fake-Tudor’ chairs and ‘shiny fake-Plantagenet’ tables, ‘Neon lights and touring-club signs’; and the mention of ‘glutinous waltz-music oozing through the loud-speaker from a Jewish trio in a London grill-room’ adds to these charges of the miscegenation of the rural by the urban and the dilution of authenticity by cosmopolitanism.[81] Thus the road, and the codes of behaviour and the cultural codes of seeing and experiencing associated with its use, constituted not only a structural member for the landscape at large but as a moral structure for society.

In a sense the inn, like the suburb, occupied a place in the debatable transitional zone between town and country. The attempts of Richardson in The Old Inns of England to root it in locality and in historically- and geographically- rooted identity can be seen as a strategy to overcome this equivocal positioning. The railways, too, publicized inns and encouraged their customers to see in them a ‘traditional’ England,[82] but because their conveyances, unlike motorized transport, could not bring travellers to the doors of their inns they created the image of the initiate traveller, approaching the inn (as with the village, or the church) on foot and on its own terms. The inn thus provides a case study for the strategies used by road and rail to structure access to the landscape socially and morally, and load it with meanings which could only be decoded if the correct protocols of behaviour were applied. Both road and rail offered access, but in neither case was that access unconditional.

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Notes

1. Ivor Brown, The Heart of England (London: Batsford, 1935), pp. 1-2.

2. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 2000).

3. Sean O’Connell, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring 1896-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 19; B. R. Mitchell (ed.), British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 230.

4. Christopher Savage, An Economic History of Transport (London: Pelican, 1967), p. 144.

5. G. Eyre-Todd, The London Midland & Scottish Railway (London: Newnes, 1926), pp. 2-3.

6. Eyre-Todd, London Midland & Scottish Railway, p. 3.

7. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 64-7.

8. See the perceptive critique of the limitations of Matless’s inadequate approach in A. Bennett, The Great Western Railway and the Celebration of Englishness (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of York, 2000), pp. x-xiii.

9. G. E. Orton, ‘Railway publicity’, Great Western Railway Magazine, vol. 47 (October 1934), p. 419.

10. Bennett, Great Western Railway, p. 22.

11. Thomas Sharp, Town and Countryside: Some Aspects of Urban and Rural Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 11.

12. Thomas Sharp, English Panorama (London: Pelican, 1936), p. 88.

13. Gordon Cherry, The Evolution of British Town Planning (Leighton Buzzard: Leonard Hill, 1974), p. 108; Matless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 33ff.

14. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 33.

15. Thomas Sharp, Town Planning (London: Pelican, 1940), p. 45.

16. Sharp, Town Planning, p. 55.

17. Sharp, Town Planning, pp. 45ff.

18. Sharp, Town Planning, pp. 54, 55.

19. Sharp, Town Planning, p. 39.

20. H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), pp. 4, 12.

21. John Davidson, ‘The Testament of Sir John Simplex Concerning Automobilism’, in The Poems of John Davidson, ed. A. Turnbull (2 vols., Edinburgh & London: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), vol. 2, p. 373.

22. Davidson, ‘Testament of Sir John Simplex’, p. 377.

23. Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1928), p. 29.

24. Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus, p. 170.

25. Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus, p. 57

26. Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus, pp. 57-8.

27. Brown, Heart of England, p. 59.

28. Brown, Heart of England, p. 61.

29. J. B. Priestley, English Journey (1934; London: Heinemann, 1984), p.300.

30. Priestley, English Journey, p. 136.

31. Osbert Sitwell, Penny Foolish (1935); quoted in Jack Simmons (ed.), Railways: an Anthology (London: Collins, 1991), p. 254.

32. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902; London: Faber, 1946), p. 55.

33. Howard, Garden Cities, p. 144.

34. Howard, Garden Cities, p. 145.

35. Paul S. Cadbury, Birmingham – Fifty Years On (Birmingham: Bourneville Village Trust, 1952), p. 55.

36. E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (1910; London: Penguin, 1983), p. 29.

37. Ashley Brown, The Railway Problem (London: A. & C. Black, 1940), p. 26.

38. Priestley, English Journey, p. 54.

39. C. E. M. Joad, ‘The People’s Claim’, in C. Williams-Ellis (ed.), Britain and the Beast (London: J. M. Dent, 1938), p. 77. The philosopher and broadcaster Joad has been described as ‘the most consistent campaigner against the car in the countryside’; O’Connell, Motor Car, p. 159.

40. Architectural Review, vol. 81 (1937): ‘Roads Supplement’, 169.

41. Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus, p. 162.

42. Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus, p. 172.

43. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 61.

44. G. Boumphrey, British Roads (London: Collins, 1939), p. 156.

45. Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus, p. 162.

46. County Councils Association, The Jubilee of the County Councils 1889-1939 (London, 1939), p. 25.

47. P. Abercrombie, ‘Country Planning’, in Williams-Ellis (ed.), Britain and the Beast, p. 137.

48. Wells, Anticipations, p. 17.

49. Wells, Anticipations, p. 64.

50. Wells, Anticipations, p. 19.

51. Railway Gazette, 16 November 1923, p. 614.

52. Railway Gazette, 16 November 1923, p. 615.

53. Great Western Railway Magazine, vol. 36 (1924), p. 253.

54. T. Sharp, ‘The north-east – hills and hells’, in Williams-Ellis (ed.), Britain and the Beast, p. 151.

55. Sharp, ‘The north-east’, p. 151.

56. A. Collett, The Changing Face of England (London: Nisbet, 1926), p. 182.

57. Collett, Changing Face, pp. 182-3.

58. Collett, Changing Face, pp. 183-4.

59. Collett, Changing Face, pp. 184.

60. H. V. Morton, In Search of England (1927; 21st edn., London: Methuen, 1934), p. 3.

61. Morton, In Search of England, p. 7.

62. Morton, In Search of England, p. 256.

63. Morton, In Search of England, pp. 11, 78, 151, 231.

64. Bennet, Great Western Railway, p. 60.

65. C. E. M. Joad, A Charter for Ramblers (1934); quoted in Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 63.

66. These posters are illustrated in Beverley Cole & Richard Durack, British Railway Posters 1923-47(London: Laurence King, 1992), pp. 32, 40, 85.

67. ‘F.V.M.’, Cotswold Ways (London: GWR, & Hamilton Simkin Marshall, 1924), p. 23.

68. Bennett, Great Western Railway, p. 60.

69. F. G. Richens, ‘The unknown Cotswolds’, Great Western Railway Magazine, vol. 47 (1935), p. 265.

70. Bennett, Great Western Railway, p. 61.

71. Joad, ‘People’s claim’, p. 79.

72. Joad, ‘People’s claim’, p. 70.

73. Joad, ‘People’s claim’, p. 71.

74. Joad, ‘People’s claim’, p. 79.

75. Brown, Heart of England, p. 78. For all his dislike of the modern roadhouse, Brown did not romanticise the traditional inn: ‘a great many village inns are tawdry beer-houses, where an incompetent landlord ... serves out tepid swipes in dirty glasses in a fly-blown bar ...’ (ibid, p. 40).

76. A. E. Richardson, The Old Inns of England (London: Batsford, 1934), ‘Foreword’ by Sir Edwin Lutyens, p. v.

77. Richardson, Old Inns, p. 1.

78. Richardson, Old Inns, p. 99

79. Richardson, Old Inns, p. 100

80. Richardson, Old Inns, p. 102.

81. Richardson, Old Inns, pp. 1, 39, 40.

82. See, for example, the London Midland & Scottish Railway’s Some Old English Inns (London: LMS, 1931), and the series of articles in the Great Western Magazine on ‘Some Old Inns on the Great Western’.