When Britain joined life in the fast lane

They were a drivers’ dream – long-distance routes free of traffic and roadworks. David Behrens revisits Britain’s earliest motorways.

BRITAIN HAD some 4.5m cars before it could boast a single motorway on which to drive them. But as these archive pictures of some of the earliest examples demonstrate, there was still plenty of Tarmac to go around.

The first US freeway, connecting Pasadena to Los Angeles, opened in 1940, and in the course of the next decade and a half, Austria, France, Belgium, Denmark and Poland could boast at least one stretch of motorway. Germany had more than the others put together.

But it was not until the end of the 1950s that the three-lane highways and blue signs which have been a feature of life ever since, became part of the British landscape.

Plans had been drawn up during the war for a high-speed road network, but it took until November 1959 for the Transport Minister, Ernest Marples, to be able to declare open the first 72mile section of the M1. He did so using one of the police’s newfangled radio telephones.

It was not the country’s first such road – the eight-mile Preston bypass had opened the previous year – but it was the first time drivers could travel long distances free of traffic lights, junctions and, for the time being, roadworks.

It would be another nine years before the M1 reached Leeds.

By 1972 the network stretched to 1,000m, but it was the 1980s that were the boom years for construction.

In the early days, the highways were novelties in themselves, and it was not unusual for families to make day trips just to eat lunch at one of the service stations whose silver service restaurants overlooked the carriageway. Watford Gap in Northamptonshire, which opened on the same day as the M1, was the first of the new breed and became renowned as the point at which the South-East gave way to the Midlands.

PICTURES: GETTY IMAGES PICTURE: GETTY IMAGES. TRANSPORT NETWORK: From top, the Leeds-Sheffield stretch of the M1 under construction between Horbury and Ossett in 1965; a section of the south-east Leeds motorway which opened in December 1972; the M1 near Luton in November 1959; traffic on the M1, London to Birmingham, near the Broughton flyover, shortly after Transport Minister, Ernest Marples, opened the motorway on November 2, 1959. ON THE MOVE: Britain’s new London to Birmingham motorway, the M1, as seen from the Luton spur.

PICTURE: GETTY IMAGES. ALL SYSTEMS GO: Transport Minister, Ernest Marples, uses a police radio telephone to order police to open up the newly inaugurated M1 motorway to traffic on November 2, 1959.

PICTURES: GETTY IMAGES. CHANGE OF LANDSCAPE: Top, the M1 under construction near Watford; above, Eva Peace looks out of the window of her flat in Gilda Court, Mill Hill, London, at the newly-built M1 motorway flyover at Five Ways on November 24, 1969. Her flat was only 15 feet from the structure.