On Roads: A Hidden History
By Joe Moran
Profile Books £18.99 290 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

On the one hand there was J Bonington Jagworth, relentlessly fast driver of a Boggs Super-Oaf and leader of the Motorists’ Liberation Front. On the other, there was Daniel Hooper, aka Swampy, the embodiment of equally militant opposition to British road-building in the 1990s.

Technically, Jagworth did not exist – he was a creation of The Daily Telegraph’s satirical columnist Peter Simple. Swampy was real enough: the last person dug out of a catacomb in Devon designed to prevent the building of a new stretch of dual carriageway, he briefly became a television personality and tabloid newspaper columnist. He was last heard of living in a yurt in Wales.

The British are divided into Jagworthians and Swampy-ites, though the characteristics generally co-exist in the same person and come to the fore depending on whether or not they are behind the wheel. The population will defend every blade of grass against the onward march of asphalt with an intensity that does not exist anywhere else and would be unimaginable in the US. Yet when a new road somehow does get built, no motorist ever boycotts it. Emotionally, the British are still attached to long-closed rural railways, every one of which has been lovingly chronicled. In practice, they drive on roads. Does anyone write about them, let alone show them any affection? Not normally.

Until Joe Moran, a cultural historian at John Moores University in Liverpool, got hold of the subject. His blog is headed: “On the everyday, the banal and other important matters.” The more unpromising the territory, the more likely he is to put his ear to the ground and listen. This is a writer who has spent hours prowling under motorway flyovers. The upshot is a book that is fresh and original.

On Roads is essentially a history of British roads and how they are used. That bare description hardly does it justice, however. There is no mention of Jagworth, though there is a whole gallery of implausible characters. There was the Conservative MP Louis Sinclair, who claimed in 1904 that driving on the right down Regent Street in London counted as parliamentary privilege. And the 26th Baron de Clifford, who in 1935 became the last member of the House of Lords to be tried by his peers, after a fatal collision on the Kingston bypass when he was also on the wrong side on the road. (Not guilty was the verdict: the dead man was a commoner.) Then there are the Davidsons, David and Jean, permanent residents – for nearly a quarter of a century – of a motorway Travelodge.

Moran is terrific on all the quirky nonsense. Did you know the motorway cone was invented by a plastics engineer who was trying to produce toy elephants? But he gets the big picture too: “In the long tradition of English landscape criticism”, he writes, “the straight road remains a recurring motif of cold-hearted modernity. It is almost the reverse of the iconography of the American road, with its classic narrative of the road trip – which is all about escaping from the rhythms of mundane existence.”

He accurately chronicles the way attitudes flipped quickly from the 1960s, when new motorways were seen as cool and modern – and, indeed, beguilingly American – to the environmentally-minded 1970s. Then, local protesters scored a string of victories to stop cities being shredded to build roads.

And he understands how British transport policy is always beset by cock-up. Britain’s motorway age began in 1956 when work started on the Preston bypass, the first section of what is now the M6. It stopped a few seconds later: the digger ran out of petrol. The road opened in December 1958. It closed 47 days later due to “frost heave”.

Matthew Engel is an FT columnist and author of ‘Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain’ (Macmillan)