Dave Phillips

Now here’s a question for your next club quiz night: What has the interior of the 1989 Discovery got in common with the overhead restaurant that straddles the M1 motorway at Leicester Forest East services? Answer: Both were designed by Sir Terence Conran. He was also the founder of Habitat, the trendy furniture chain of furniture shops that was the Ikea of the 1980s. He was knighted in 1983 and, therefore, just plain Mr Conran when Leicester Forest East opened in 1966, as part of the second phase of the M1’s construction. The first phase had opened in 1959 and had stopped abruptly at Crick (now junction 18).

It was built at a time when Britain was in love with motorways and this pitstop with Conran’s restaurant over the carriageway was hugely popular, with its silver service waitresses dressed in black frocks with frilly white aprons. No, I’m not reliving a fantasy here: they really were that posh. People came here to dine and watch the traffic.

At the dawn of the 1960s most working class British families did not own cars and motorways were the wonders of the modern world.

It was a different world to the one we know now. Like most men, my father worked in a factory. He was an engineer in a company in King’s Lynn that made roller bearings and, like most companies, it had a thriving sports and social club that organised regular coach trips for workers and their families. I well remember one trip in 1960 to Whipsnade Zoo. I was only four years old, but my clearest memory of that day was on the way home when the coach driver stopped at a bridge over the newly-built M1 so that the passengers could clamber out and watch the traffic below.

Back then, there were no speed limits on motorways and the M1 was conveniently placed for manufacturers like Aston Martin ( based at nearby Newport Pagnell) to test their high-speed cars. On the Sunday back in 1960 when we stopped to watch the motorway I’m sure the traffic consisted mainly of Austin A35s and Morris Minors lumbering along at 45 mph, but the thought was there.

Driving a fast car on those early, empty motorways without worrying about speed limits must have been great fun, but it couldn’t last. The beginning of the end came on June 11, 1964, when AC Cars conducted a high-speed run of its 4.8-litre Cobra Coupe GT prior to that year’s Le Mans race. Works driver Jack Sears took off from Watford Gap services at 4.00 am and recorded 185 mph on the deserted M1 in Northamptonshire. When Fleet Street got to hear of it, they had a field day and the Labour government’s Transport Minister, Barbara Castle, pushed through a temporary maximum speed limit of 70 mph on Britain’s motorways on December 22, 1965. It was supposed to be a 100day trial, but of course it has stuck ever since.

But I digress. What I do know is that without the new motorways and bypasses built from the 1960s onwards this country would have ground to a halt. The anti-motoring lobby is a vociferous minority that wields a disproportionate amount of influence on our witless politicians. They say that building new roads is pointless because they just fill up with more cars, but it’s not new roads that encourage people to buy cars, it’s affordability. Unlike the early 1960s, just about everyone today can afford to own and drive a car. Away from the urban centres, car ownership is a necessity because Britain’s public transport network isn’t fit for purpose.

I’m a country boy and I love the countryside at least as much as anyone, but like most rural folk I know that new roads are vital. When they bypass towns and villages they improve the quality of life of the inhabitants of those places, as well as the journeys of those passing through. Unless we step up the road building programme, Britain will become one giant traffic jam.

Motorists don’t just drive cars: we also drive the nation’s economy. We are the quiet majority and we need our cars as well as better roads to drive them on. We’re fed up of being stuck in traffic jams, fleeced with taxes and blamed for polluting the planet. We don’t want our beloved diesel Land Rovers scrapped, either. Are you listening, politicians?

“The anti-motoring lobby is a vociferous minority that wields a disproportionate amount of influence on our witless politicians”