Motorway Timeline
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A quick whistle-stop tour of the history of British motorways. Some of the points on this page are explored in more depth in other places on the website - there's links in the text. There's also a lot of detail that isn't here. This page is best used as an introduction to the subject, or as an outline to place other events in context.
1948
An act to create 'Special Roads' goes through parliament, which allows the government to build 'special roads' - roads that aren't public rights of way like others and are restricted just to motorised traffic. This is the legal stuff that makes motorways possible.
The idea for motorways had existed before this of course: plans had existed in the 1920s for 'motor roads', most notably London to Brighton or to Birmingham and Manchester. These were mostly along the lines of Italian Autostrade, and were private projects exploiting odd laws (like one governing light railways) to exclude pedestrians. The 1948 law made the business much simpler and indicated the government's interest in building motorways in the near future.
1956
The government actually decides to use the 8-year-old powers and builds a first little experimental motorway to bypass a small town called Preston. See this page for more on the Preston Bypass.
Curiously this was not the first bit of motorway construction: a couple of years earlier Lancashire County Council was given a large amount of waste material from a company doing quarrying work. As the material was free, the Council decided to put it to use, and started piling it up on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal near Barton to form embankments to a bridge: plans had been put forward at that time for a new bypass to Salford, which later opened (using the bridge embankments) as the M62.
1958
The Preston Bypass opens and is a huge success, except that it is far below the needed capacity and can't cope with the hammering it gets from high speed traffic. It closes within six months for extensive maintenance, and the wide central reservation is used to add an extra lane each way. Despite this the government decides this is the way forward and begins building miles and miles of motorway, with better specification and capacity.
When it was planned, the Preston Bypass was seen as the first piece of a large network. Space was made near its northern end for a three-level junction, now realised as the M6/M55 interchange. Three other sections of motorway, totalling about eighty miles, were already well under way when the Bypass opened.
1959
First section of M1 opens - almost 60 miles of six-lane motorway plus various spurs. Its first service area, Watford Gap, becomes a tourist attraction. Its design capacity was 14,000 vehicles per day, which was reached on opening day.
The M1 was expected to attract lots of traffic - so much that there were fears the road network at each end wouldn't be able to cope. A spur was built at each end, the M10 and M45, to throw as much traffic off as possible before the road terminated. Today, unmodified except for the addition of hard shoulders and crash barriers, the southern bit of the M1 carries ten times the amount of traffic it was designed for. Amazingly, it still moves most of the time.
1963
The Beeching Report to the government. This was to do with railways but is still important: Beeching reccommended shutting down about 25% of the rail network, mostly branch lines and quieter bits. The government spent the next couple of years doing this. It was tacitly expected that most people would use roads from now on. In the years that followed, the Department of Transport regularly plundered the rail budget to build more roads.
1966
Landmark year in motorway building; the M4 Severn Bridge is completed linking England and Wales and cutting short an 80 mile detour around the estuary, and progress on other long distance routes such as the M1 and M6 is nearing completion.
By 1966 it was possible to travel between Birmingham and Lancaster by motorway, most of the way from London to Leeds, and on substantial parts of the routes from London to the Channel Ports. Other bits and pieces were open too, most notably sections of the M4, the M40 some of the way to Oxford and parts of the M62 around Manchester.
1969
1,000 miles of motorway are completed. The government pledges to build another 1,000 in the next decade.
The motorway specification was also upped in this year. Crash barriers were being built on all new routes and retro-fitted on old ones; it was also in this year that the very first electronic matrix signs were installed in the central reservation of the M4 near the Severn Bridge. This, and the high specification for construction, made British motorways easily the most technologically evolved in Europe.
1976
Oil crisis in the Middle East: road construction comes to a sudden stop. It is resumed afterwards but the government, shaken by how much the nation suddenly depends on oil to get around, never invests so much in road building again. In the years that follow motorway building is less high profile and fast paced; in effect this is the end of the high-powered motorway mania that started in the early 1960s.
The M5 was troubled in this year in other ways: the Avonmouth Bridge, which was started in 1972, was only just being finished after numerous setbacks including technical faults, changing specifications and strikes.
1979
The next 1,000 mile target is not met. Road building goes on at a slower pace.
1986
Margaret Thatcher incites a new era of pro-roads policy from the government, declaring "anyone aged 30 on a bus is a failure". Within a couple of years the white paper 'Roads to Prosperity', which outlines hundreds of miles of new road to be built, is launched.
The paper never goes through and most of the roads are never built, but the government presses on with road construction nevertheless. Thatcher personally opened the final section of M25 as a symbol of her support for road building. Within a few weeks the road was running beyond its intended capacity.
1991
The M40 between London and Birmingham is finished - the last long distance route built. It is so plagued by environmental protests that some parts of the route are full of sharp corners to avoid woodland that would have been happily bulldozed in the 1960s.
It contains one of the sharpest bends on the motorway network in an attempt to avoid several Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Before it was opened, several police cars were employed repeatedly taking the corner at high speeds to make sure it was safe for public use.
1993
Twyford Down. The three-mile gap in the M3, where six lanes of motorway traffic have to follow the A33 around Winchester, is finally closed. The decision is made to build the final piece of M3 to replace the narrow 1920s dual carriageway which has several sets of traffic lights and is one of the country's worst bottlenecks.
The cash-poor government in the depths of recession says it cannot afford to build a tunnel under Twyford Down, an important local landmark, and to prevent the road from interfering with a hill fort called St Catharine's Hill. Instead the M3 is ploughed through in a cutting, all but destroying Twyford Down. Environmental protests are so heavy that the policing costs were greater than the amount saved by not building a tunnel.
1997
Tony Blair becomes Prime Minister as New Labour beat the Conservatives in national elections; his transport minister John Prescott announces the 'New Deal for Transport' which effectively took any remaining road construction plans and shredded them.
Prescott is publicly seen to cancel numerous projects, including the Hastings bypass, numerous motorway widening projects, dualling and widening of roads like the A66 and A30, and notoriously halting constructon of half the Polegate Bypass (the other half was still built and opened).
The run-down rail network is brought to the front line as the government's favourite way of moving people around, though Blair refuses to re-nationalise it following its 1994 privatisation.
2000
The very last motorway that Blair's government agreed to fund, the last section of M60 at Manchester, opens to traffic. For the first time since around 1954 no new motorways are under construction.
2001
A new motorway is started - a northern bypass for Birmingham first proposed in the 1980s. As the government will not agree to build it with public money, a consortium of several companies called Midland Expressway is granted a contract to build it instead. The road will have toll booths at exit points to fund its costs. It is called the M6 Toll, Britain's first tolled motorway route.
With thanks to Emrys Jones, Danny Turner, Paul Aston and Andy for corrections to this page.
