On Roads: A Hidden History [Hardcover]

`Truly wonderful...every minute devoted to this book is richly rewarded.' --David McKie, author of 'Great British Bus Journeys'

'Wonderful. Joe Moran is the master of turning the mundane realities of everyday life into the stuff of history.' - Dominic Sandbrook
--Dominic Sandbrook

'Terrific... he takes numerous diversions into subjects that really shouldn't be interesting, but which he makes fascinating... entertainingly contrarian' - Robert Macfarlane, The Guardian
--Robert Macfarlane, The Guardian

'Packed with fascinating detail' --Brian Morton, Glasgow Herald

`Expansive, unexpected cultural history... it's loaded with strange and delightful details ... I've got many pages folded over' --Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic

`This is a part-bonkers, part-brilliant book, as many of the best books are.' --Jonathan Wright, The Tablet

`The optimism and sense of wonder of the era is evoked brilliantly... an elegant piece of scholarship... engrossing' --Alasdair Reid, Sunday Herald

`Books of the Year 2009: A beautifully written, funny and original book to place alongside the psychogeographies of Iain Sinclair.' --Harry Eyres, FT

`One of the most surprisingly enjoyable and informative books of the year, a highly original work' --Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times Books of the Year 2009

`A pretty fascinating read... full of memorable passages.' --Roddy Wooble, Books of the Year - Sunday Herald

`Wonderful. Whoever could have known that roads were so fascinating?'

`Fascinating, thought-provoking and entertaining ... A wonderful book. Moran has fast become Britain's foremost explorer and explainer of the disregarded.' Juliet Gardiner, author of 'Wartime: Britain 1939-1945'

`a fascinating insight...by one of Britain's best cultural-studies academics...a really necessary book.'

We use roads every day, yet we have no idea of why our journeys are the way they are - of how roads are built, signposted, mapped or numbered. In unravelling this history, cultural historian Joe Moran throws a whole new light onto our history and our daily lives.

'On Roads, a beautifully-written, quiet masterpiece, looks at our experience of roads from the motorway age onwards' - Bee Wilson, Sunday Times

'What Moran manages above all, in this entertainingly contrarian book, is to reclaim the road as a country of its own.' - Robert Macfarlane, The Guardian

'On Roads deserves high praise... an original and fascinating excursion... never anything but dry, witty and erudite.' - Christopher Hart, Literary Review

'Joe Moran has a genius for turning the prosaic poetic - this is a tone poem in tarmac.' - Peter Hennessy

'This is a really necessary book - one wonders why it hasn't been done before' - Giles Foden, Condé Nast Traveller

In this history of roads and what they have meant to the people who have driven them, one of Britain's favourite cultural historians reveals how a relatively simple road system turned into a maze-like pattern of roundabouts, flyovers, clover-leafs and spaghetti junctions. Using a unique blend of travel writing, anthropology, history and social observation, he explores how Britain's roads have their roots in unexpected places. He visits the Roman role in the way our roads are numbered, the ancient sat-nav systems of China of 2600BC and the unknown demonstrations against by-passes in the 1920s, and ends up at the roots of today's arguments about road pricing and road rage. Full of quirky nuggets of history, On Roads also celebrates the often overlooked people whose work we take for granted, such as Percy Shaw, the inventor of the catseye, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, the designers of the road sign system, and Charles Forte, the entrepreneur behind the service station. These stories of our past shed light on hidden changes in our society, the relation between people and nature and the invisibility of the mundane.And - on subjects ranging from speed limits to driving on the left, and the "non-places" where we stop to the unwritten laws of traffic jams - they have never been told together, until now.

In this highly original slice of post-war history, Joe Moran explores how the British have built, mapped and driven the roads that we all use but rarely stop to think about. Focusing on the era after the birth of the M1 in 1959, he reveals how our simple road system evolved into a complex network that developed its own rules as if it were another country. He also uncovers the unexpected roots of this hidden world from Napoleon's role in the numbering system to the surprising origins of sat-nav. Moran investigates our previously neglected relationship with the road through an unusual mixture of history, anthropology and social observation. There is much that can be learnt from our attitudes to speed cameras, the secret language of lorry-drivers, and even the 'non-places' where we rest by the side of the road. Celebrating along the way the innovators whose work we take for granted, such as the designers of our road signs and the first theorist of traffic jams, On Roads shows how the everyday can be as extraordinary as it is invisible. Written with wit, warmth and authority, it will change forever the way you look through your windscreen.

'Joe Moran has a genius for turning the prosaic poetic - this is a tone poem in tarmac. Motorway journeys will never be so dull again. A treat' Peter Hennessy, author of Having It So Good 'Wonderful. Joe Moran is the master of turning the mundane realities of everyday life into the stuff of history, and in this book he has surpassed himself. Whoever could have known that roads were so fascinating?' Dominic Sandbrook, author of White Heat 'It is hard to say which is the more remakable here: the astonishing range and variety of what Joe Moran knows, or the easeful, evocative, luxuriously entertaining way he parcels it up and puts it across' David McKie, author of Great British Bus Journeys

Joe Moran is a Reader in Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. He writes regularly for The Guardian and the New Statesman, and the THES have tipped him as one of the bestselling academics of the future. He is the author of Queuing for Beginners, also published by Profile [9781861978417], and lives in Liverpool.