Book review: On Roads

You might think that reading a history of roads would be about as interesting as being stuck on the M25 on a stifling hot day," said Bee Wilson in the Sunday Times. "You would be wrong." Joe Moran, a cultural historian with a special interest in the parts of our everyday lives we take for granted, has delved into the story of the British highway - particularly the postwar motorway - and made out of it "a beautifully written, quiet masterpiece".

It's all here, "from road humps to speed cameras, spaghetti junctions to Mondeo Man, Happy Eaters to John Major's cones hotline, ley lines to pylons". On Roads is filled with truly fascinating details. Who knew that seagulls often cluster in Birmingham because they mistake the M5 for a river? Or that pulped books are used in tarmac (the M6 toll road contains several million Mills & Boon novels)? "Occasionally, Moran will lapse into the language of the cultural-history seminar ('semiotics', 'liminal') and sometimes the narrative becomes too compressed." Mostly, though, he weaves together his "fascinating nuggets with a rare lightness of touch".

It's hard to imagine now, but the first motorways created great excitement, said Linda Christmas in the Daily Telegraph. When the eight-mile-long Preston bypass was opened in 1958, one newspaper announced "a day of national rejoicing". People brought out deck chairs and picnics to watch the M1 being built, and when it opened - all 55 miles of tarmac, with no speed limit - motorists descended from all over Britain.

Over the first weekend, the AA was called out every six minutes to tend to blowouts and wrecked big-ends. Barbara Castle, opening the M4-M5 interchange in 1966, described such junctions as "the cathedrals of the modern world". But disillusion soon set in, said Stephen McClarence in the Times. Ecstatic day-trippers gave way to traffic jams, road rage and environmental protesters. The motorways, Moran writes, now "seem to symbolise the mistakes of 1960s planning and the car-clogged world it bequeathed us".

This is a "terrific" history, said Robert Macfarlane in the Guardian. "Along the way Moran takes numerous diversions into subjects that shouldn't really be interesting, but which he makes fascinating: the development of the road atlas, or the history of the roadside verge.” He is equally good on the design of road signs and the science of asphalt. All in all, On Roads is a wonderful guide to what he calls "the most commonly viewed and least contemplated landscape in Britain".

On Roads: A Hidden History, by Joe Moran, 312pp (Profile, £14.99) The Week Bookshop £13.49 (incl p&p)