Driving North/Driving South reprised: Britain’s changing roadscapes, 2000–2020

Abstract

This article explores how Britain’s changing roadscapes are apprehended by the road-user with reference to my own experience of driving the same route between Scotland and Cornwall over the past quarter-century. My pre-millennial analysis of these journeys (published 2000) is compared with more recent driving-events and deploys the same multi-layered autoethnographic methods I first experimented with then. My central argument is concerned with the ways in which drivers and passengers both respond and contribute to such change vis-a-vis those aspects of their own autobiographies which are entwined with the ‘lifecourse of the road’ (Mikhail Bakhtin). The concept I have devised to account for the ways in which the materiality of the road is entangled with the cognitive and affective passage of the traveller is journeying: i.e. the means by which the individual journey is overlaid, and shaped, not only by previous journeys but also the life-journey of the traveller for whom a familiar route has special meaning. The analysis reveals the extent to which increased traffic and congestion has impacted upon the experience of driving long-distance routes as well as the critical role roadside landmarks (and their disappearance) play in orienting and disorienting the traveller.

Keywords:

• Roads
• motorways
• automobility
• place memory
• place attachment
• kinaesthetics
• landmarks

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tim Edensor and Peter Merriman, as well as my anonymous reviewers, for their helpful feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An early version of this paper was presented to the ‘Mobility and Migration Group’ at the University of British Columbia in 2000 and a more recent version to the T2M conference in Padua in 2022. Many thanks to participants for their feedback.

2 It should nevertheless be noted that while this article speaks indirectly to recent debates on mobility and the lifecourse (e.g. Holdsworth 2013, Stratford 2015, Murray and Robertson 2016, Pearce 2019) this is not the primary object of enquiry in this article. Rather than attending to the significance of mobilities of different kinds during the various phases of the lifecourse, my focus here is on the significance of recursive journeying (along familiar routes) in creating a continuity of embodied, cognitive and affective traveller-experience that may be disturbed by the changing road environment.

3 ‘Driving Event’: the term I devised to account for the way in which every journey by car is potentially unique on account of the variable factors that inform it including the driver or passenger’s thought-processes during the journey. See Pearce 2014, 2016, 2017 for a full exploration of this concept.

4 Statistics from the Department of Transport reveal that the number of licensed cars on the road increased from 27.2 million in 2000 to 32.7 million in 2020. However, there has also been a large increase in LGVs during that time with the result that the total number of vehicles on British roads in 2021 was recorded as 39.2 million (www.gov.uk). Road Traffic Estimates (2020) also reveal that it is motorways that have born the brunt of the increase in vehicle miles over the past two decades. Despite the pandemic, ‘in 2020, 60 per cent of all vehicles miles were travelled on motorways and, on an average day, 44 times more vehicles travelled along a typical stretch of motorway than a typical stretch of minor road’ (see www.racfoundation.org).