Driving Spaces: A Cultural-Historical Geography of England's M1 Motorway (review)

Historians approaching the topic of Peter Merriman's important study of the M1 motorway between London and the Midlands section of England might remind themselves of two English antecedents: the early modern English turnpikes, which were privately financed, built, and managed; and the landscaping of large tracts of land as parks containing farms, roads, and agricultural land. Somewhat surprisingly, the first section of the M1 to be opened, in 1959, some fifty-five miles long, did not incorporate either idea: the roads were government-built and free to use for anyone with a car, and British landscape designers were largely left out of the design process. Rather than picturesque, the road was to be thoroughly modern, even modernist in an architectural sense, and as straight as could be. This esthetic startled many observers, as did the experience of driving the M1, which upset notions of time and space by compressing travel time. For the first half-decade of its existence, motorists could even drive as fast as they pleased on the M1: a speed limit was imposed only in 1965.

Thus, this relatively small stretch of road offers a fascinating opportunity to understand the relationship between humans and the ways they move through the world. Merriman succeeds at disentangling and analyzing such phenomena; his book should be read by anyone interested in the history of mobility in the 20th century, whether inside or outside the United Kingdom. As a geographer, he is well-equipped to describe and understand the spatiality of these arrangements. His book makes it quite clear why cultural geography has become an exporter of ideas in the last fifteen years or so. While the geographical and sociological jargon of mobility studies may not be familiar to historians, its results are analytically rich.

When countries such as the United States, Italy, and Germany were already building roads solely for automobiles in the 1920s and 1930s, engineers and designers in Britain followed these projects and sought ways to incorporate such roads into their vernacular landscapes, both literally and figuratively. British highway envy even led some observers, and not only those with Nazi sympathies, to express fawning admiration of the German autobahn. But it was only in the 1950s that the United Kingdom's first motorway was built. In Merriman's account, the preconstruction debates were intensely British, if not insular. It was imperative that properly British motorways be conceived and constructed.

The three strongest chapters deal with the design, construction, and consumption of the motorway. As in other countries, landscape architects and engineers clashed over appropriate design parameters. On the first section of the M1, modernist architects designed visually dominant bridges over long straightaways, thus shocking observers schooled in the traditions of the picturesque. Merriman details the labor conditions and the use of machinery in a chapter that relies heavily on radio shows produced for the BBC by leftist folk singers who had interviewed workers.

The process of acculturating drivers to the new high-speed road is described by looking at prescriptive sources such as rules, regulations, movies, and instructional booklets. Echoing Sean O'Connell's The Car and British Society (1998), which dealt with the first half of the 20th century, Merriman stresses the importance of class and gender for motoring on the M1. In his final chapter, he delineates how the M1 ceased to be a novelty after a few years and examines how it featured in theater plays, novels, and movies. He forcefully defends the road and all freeways against perceptions that they are "non-places," as the anthropologist Marc Auge would have it. Instead, the author embeds them in their historical, social, and cultural environments.

This is a theoretically sophisticated study which wrestles not only with the historically contingent ways in which the British transformed their country while adopting automobility, but also with more general questions about this process. In giving us an in-depth study of one country...