GoKawiilThe ‘turnpike’ toll road system deserves far more credit for improving roads in eighteenth-century England and Wales, a new study argues. Analysis of nearly 100 travellers’ diaries reveals that turnpiking improved comfort and reduced danger on the roads, as well as speeding up wheeled vehicle journeys.
‘through a most excellent turnpike road and a delightfully improved country, [we] arrived at the old “Angel Inn”, Wolverhampton, where we dined.’ Samuel Curwen, 13th June 1777
Potholes may be Public Enemy No.1 for British road users today but toll roads aren’t much more popular. Three hundred years ago, however, British diarists started to credit major improvements to their journeys to ‘turnpiking’, a toll-funded system of maintaining and improving main roads in England and Wales.
In a study published in Explorations in Economic History, researchers from Cambridge and UC Irvine analysed the mode and speed of travel of nearly 100 diarists between the mid-1600s to 1820, together with their observations about the quality of the roads they were using. Using mapping software, the researchers digitised journeys amounting to nearly 350,000 miles, and applied textual analysis and a scoring system to road descriptions.
While previous studies have suggested that turnpikes led to improvements, scholars have disagreed about the timing, pace and extent of this change. Until now, data limitations have made it difficult to compare outcomes on turnpike roads versus standard parish roads. This has left the system vulnerable to the charge that significant improvement only came in the 1820s with the advances in road design and construction promoted by Telford and McAdam.
But this study shows that the turnpike system achieved major improvements well before 1760, and that that progress accelerated into the nineteenth century. UC Irvine’s Professor Dan Bogart, and Cambridge’s Professor Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Dr Alan Rosevear found that roads were 78 percent more likely to be judged ‘at least acceptable’ in the period 1760–1820 than in the period 1660–1759. The researchers think the extent of improvement probably exceeded this because road users became harder to please as they grew accustomed to better roads.
“This is the first study to focus on the road user experience,” Professor Dan Bogart said. “Diaries give us unique insight into how things changed on the roads, and with that information, we can say far more definitively that the turnpike system dramatically improved road travel in the eighteenth century.”
The study credits turnpikes with making a major contribution to the Industrial Revolution.
Professor Leigh Shaw-Taylor said: “The improvements brought about by turnpikes reduced freight rates, which enabled a major expansion in internal trade and increased regional specialisation – key features of the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, better roads not only made it possible to travel by stagecoach much faster, but 24 hours a day, because travelling by night became much safer. As a result, Britain benefited from far greater circulation of people, money and ideas.”
The diarists – comprised of Brits as well as overseas visitors – include Daniel Defoe; Anne Lister, now known as ‘the first modern lesbian’; the philanthropist Jonas Hanway; Joseph Taylor, a former lawyer and Tory politician; Samuel Curwen, a loyalist refugee from the American revolution; the agricultural reformer Arthur Young; and the pioneering travel writer Celia Fiennes.
... continue reading