Turnpikes and stage coaches

Canals were built partly because the roads were so bad. Most roads were just tracks, with huge ruts and potholes. When it rained, coach wheels sank in the mud. Before 1700, no-one built new roads. It was the job of each parish to mend its roads, but not much work was ever done.

In the eighteenth century, Parliament passed laws to set up turnpike trusts. Each trust had the right to take charge of a stretch of road. It could charge tolls at toll-gates, and was supposed to repair and improve the road. Some trusts bought land, and built completely new roads.

By 1830, about 20,000 miles of Britain's roads belonged to turnpike trusts. (More than 120,000 miles were still in the hands of the parishes.) Not all the trusts did good work - some just collected tolls and left the roads as bad as before. But some trusts employed engineers to plan and build new roads and bridges.

Two famous road-builders were Thomas Telford and John Macadam. Telford used the same methods as the Romans - firm foundations and packed layers of stone and gravel. Macadam's roads were simpler - he relied on the weight of the traffic to press stones and chips into a solid surface.

Through the work of Telford, Macadam, and others, some roads were much improved. Regular stage-coach services became possible. (The coaches changed horses at coaching-inns after each eight or ten-mile 'stage'.) By 1832, the coach from London to Edinburgh took only two days. In 1754, the same journey took ten days.

Walter Robson: Britain 1750 – 1900; Oxford University Press, 1993/2002, page 27