Grand openings

Our much-loved Opening Booklets section has two new publications for you to explore, and we’re making some overdue changes to make it more prominent and more accessible too.

More than 20 years ago, we managed to get hold of a rare surviving copy of the commemorative booklet that was published to mark the opening of the M6 Preston Bypass, the UK’s first motorway. Pride in this exciting project shines from every page, and it offers an incredible selection of photographs of the experimental motorway taken shortly before it was finished.

Something like that is too good to keep hidden away. We put it online, scanning its pictures and producing a faithful recreation of its layout in miniature web pages, so you could click through it page by page and see it for yourself. You can now just see scans of the full original pages, but for more than two decades it’s been thrilling people who stumble on it and unexpectedly discover a window into another world.

Over time we picked up more of these odd little publications - all unique, but all sharing a common theme of awe-struck Brave New World descriptions of civil engineering projects that we now take for granted. Most offer photographs of gleaming new highways from another age, and a few even providing a glimpse of future plans that never came to pass. That Preston Bypass one, for example, has the only known photo of the new motorway with street lighting, because the lights were erected and then removed before the motorway ever opened.

Other people started sending us scans of similar publications that they owned. We added them all to the site.

Our Preston Bypass Booklet page became a general “Opening Booklets” page, but it’s rather outgrown that home now - it sat, for years, within our “Articles” list, which is daft because it’s not an article at all.

What’s changing today

Now we have two more booklets to add, and a whole series more in the pipeline. So we’re finally giving our Opening Booklets the recognition it deserves - it’s now a section of the website in its own right, and you’ll find it under Features in our main menu.

All the existing booklets have come over, and we’ve begun adding transcripts of the books as well. At present they’re all just scanned images, page by page, which is perfect for looking at the pictures, and it’s fine if you can read the text from an image - but not everyone can, and even then sometimes the scanned text calls for particularly good eyesight.

That's why the two new booklets added today, plus the existing one about Almondsbury Interchange, now have transcripts that make the full text available and easy to read for everyone. We’ll be going back and adding transcripts to all the others in the near future.

What’s new

Two new books have been added today, and they’re from opposite ends of the history of roadbuilding - though they also, together, make an interesting pair.

One is the oldest document we have online, titled Arterial Roads in Essex. It’s from 1925 and it marks the opening by Prince Henry of the London-Southend Road, Eastern Avenue and the Woodford Spur. Today those roads are better known as the A127 Southend Arterial Road, the A12 Eastern Avenue from Wanstead to Gallows Corner, and the A406 North Circular and A1400 between Woodford High Road and Gants Hill.

These three projects were opened at the same time because they all connected, together forming a new route from Central and North London right the way to Southend. It’s hard to imagine now just how slow and difficult that journey was before they existed. The book’s author is immensely proud of the new highway, which runs ruler straight for long periods through the countryside, and discusses at various points how it will improve its surroundings as grass is laid over the “unpleasing Essex clay” and a historic church will be made less lonely by having the road run past it.

The other new book is one of the newest, marking the opening of the M40 between Oxford and Birmingham in 1991. This enormous motorway project was, in many ways, the last grand act of the motorway programme that had begun in the late 1950s, and since then no project has delivered anything like that much road - much less that much motorway - in a single scheme. With its completion the era of entirely new motorway routes was over; since then we have seen improvements and bypasses but no grand new corridors have been opened up.

In contrast to most of our motorway opening booklets, which date from the more carefree 1960s, and in stark contrast to Arterial Roads in Essex, the M40 booklet takes great pains to explain all the environmental mitigations that were made for this thoroughly modern motorway.

Far from thinking their road would improve the countryside, the M40's designers set out to disturb it as little as possible, and measures were taken to protect natural features and to provide ways for all manner of wildlife to cross it safely. And rather than expecting a lonely historic building to feel some cheer from the lively sight of passing traffic, there is a story here about a 17th century farmhouse that was dismantled and moved to save it from having a motorway thundering by, and about the archaeological discoveries that were made before the earthmovers arrived on site.

You can read these two booklets together and see just how much changed in 65 years of roadbuilding, how the emphasis shifted not just in environmental terms but also in the scale and production-line quality of the work of roadbuilding. Or you can just dip in to one that is familiar to you.

They’re here for you to enjoy whenever you’d like to leaf through the pages of a strange and different world, and there’ll be more joining them in our new Opening Booklets section in the near future as well.