Opening Booklets

Nobody celebrates a new road these days. There's no fanfare, no mementos for the locals to keep. There's only sometimes a ribbon to cut, and a distinct shortage of little bronze plaques. And, of course, there's no glossy booklets to record what an achievement it all was.

Partly this is because it isn't an achievement: we've built a lot of roads in the last century and it's not a big thing any more. And partly it's because roads just aren't something to celebrate any more. Today new roads are often opened quietly for fear of a backlash, as if building a road gives civil servants a guilty conscience and the whole thing is better forgotten.

Until the 1970s, though, someone would usually issue a booklet of some kind to mark the opening ceremony of a new road - whether that was the Ministry of Transport, a local council or sometimes even just one of the companies involved in building it.

This part of the site lets you see just what was in them - rare, archive photos of newly-opened roads that have changed beyond all recognition and, just sometimes, a glimpse of what was planned at the time but never saw the light of day.

We're adding transcripts to each of these pages, so that the full text of the booklets is easier to read. This process is still ongoing and only some booklets have transcripts available.