Abstract
It is axiomatic to suggest that the motorised vehicle transformed the urban landscape of Britain between 1900 and 1970. Motor cars were not designed for the British roads of the early twentieth century, which were often rutted, narrow and winding, lacking clearly designated pavements, and open to many forms of competing road users. The obvious incongruity of cars on roads suitable only for nineteenth-century traffic, combined with the rapid increase in automobile numbers, and resultant road congestion and noise pollution, dramatically increased the existing traffic problems of many towns and added significantly to road deaths and injuries. Photographs of town centres in the 1920s and 1930s testify to the confusion of traffic flow on the roads that forced the second Labour government (1929–1931) to introduce The Highway Code in 1931. The fact is that there were different speed limits operating for cars, for buses, trams and other road users, which were in conflict with each other and the slow pace of the pedestrian, the cyclist and the horse. Irate car owners honked their horns to add to an incredible cacophony of sound in Britain’s urban centres. Indeed, the Daily Mail mounted a campaign in the late 1920s to reduce noise pollution in London, in conjunction with the Columbia Gramophone Company, which made two records of London Street Noises — Leicester Square and London Street Noises — Beauchamp Place, Brompton Road on 11 and 20 September 1928.4
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Notes
J. Moran (2009), On Roads: A Hidden History (London: Profile Books), pp. 477–96.
Major C. V. Godfrey (1937), Road Sense for Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 8.
Bill Luckin, ‘Out and About: Traffic, Play and Safety’, in Matthew Thomson (ed.), ‘Lost Freedom’: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 133–52. This is a pioneering essay on the topic.
Michael John Law (2012), ‘Speed and Blood on the Bypass: The New Automobilities of Inter-War London’, Urban History, 39, Part 3 (August), 490–509.
B. R. Mitchell and P. Deane (1962), Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 230. There were 330,000 motor vehicles in Britain in 1919 (110,000 of them cars), 2.2 million and 981,000, respectively, in 1929 and 3,085,000 and 1,994,000, respectively, in 1938.
P. Thorold (2003), The Automobile and Britain 1869–1930 (London: Tavistock Publications), pp. 174 and 210.
K. Laybourn and D. Taylor (2011), Policing in England and Wales, 1918–1939: The Fed, Flying Squads and Forensics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), particularly Chapter 8.
George Charlesworth (1987), A History of the Transport and Research Laboratory, 1933–1983 (Aldershot: Routledge), pp. 104–6.
M. M. Ishaque and R. B. Noland (2006), ‘Making Roads Safer for Pedestrians or Keeping Them Out of the Way: An Historical Perspective on Pedestrian Policies in Britain’, The Journal of Transport History, 27, 1 (March), 127–8; Road Research Laboratory (1963), Research on Road Safety (London), p.63.
City of Liverpool Road Safety Brochure (1953) (Liverpool: Liverpool Road Safety (Special Committee)), p. 66.
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© 2015 Keith Laybourn and David Taylor
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Laybourn, K., Taylor, D. (2015). Engineering the Environment c.1900–1970: Congestion, Meters and Redefining the Urban Landscape. In: The Battle for the Roads of Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317858_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317858_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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