Strangely fascinating...Joe Moran has delved into the brute asphalt of the post-war British highway and found a curious poetry there. Moran's special interest is in the mundane parts of our lives that we often take for granted... On Roads, a beautifully-written, quiet masterpiece, looks at our experience of roads from the motorway age onwards...
The book was inspired by a song by the band Black Box Recorder, declaring that "the English motorway system is beautiful and strange". Moran gives a wonderful sense of both the beautiful and strange...
[H]e has a knack for weaving together fascinating nuggets with a rare lightness of touch...
Moran's genius is to show us what was right in front of us all along.

His terrific book is an imaginative history, then: a study of roads "as cultural artefacts as much as concrete ones", which psychoanalyses post-war Britain through its road-network. Along the way he takes numerous turn-offs and diversions into subjects that really shouldn't be interesting, but which he makes fascinating: the development of the road atlas, for instance, or the history of the roadside verge...

He is beautiful on flyovers as concrete sculptures, on ringroads as the condensation of motopian dreams; and his account of asphalt's near-miraculous deflective pliability is - forgive me for this - pitch-perfect.

One of the many pleasures of this book is Moran's tone. Subtle parody and self-parody roll through the pages, preventing his obvious affection for roads from ever congealing into sentimentalism. His prose is tinged with a Morrisseyish melancholy for the glamour of seediness. He writes with knowingly glum bravado of Travelodges, petrol stations and road-kill.

At the other end of his tonal range is a version of JG Ballard's techno-sublime, which sees roads as both inciting and earthing the psychopathologies of a culture. But most often he sounds to me like the Elvis Costello of "London's Brilliant Parade": a singer of lugubrious songlines, geekily affectionate towards his chosen terrain, but suspicious of any easy declarations of love.

Part extended essay, part prose-poem, On Roads is doubly successful. It offers a textualisation of the road-system as a unique archive of cultural history; and it offers a re-enchantment of the road, peddling a neoromanticism of the tarmac, according to which the Red House Interchange, the Redditch Cloverleaf and the Almondsbury Four-Level Stack are as resonant a series of place-names as the Ridgeway, Stonehenge and Silbury Hill.

What Moran manages above all, in this entertainingly contrarian book, is to reclaim the road as a country of its own: a terrain vague, as worthy of exploration and study as a moorland or wood-pasture. "The land surrounding rural motorways is ... vast and unknown", he notes in a typically fine early riff. "If you are ever on the run from the law, I would strongly recommend that you hide in the wooded motorway verges of our oldest motorways, like the M1 or M6. There is just enough room for a tent in the half-century of undergrowth, and you could surely live like Stig of the Dump, undisturbed for months or years, in this uninhabited wilderness just a cone's throw from the road."

[A] book that is fresh and original... Moran is terrific on all the quirky nonsense...
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.