PRAISE FOR THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
"I was going to ride the Great North Road and write about it... but in the light of this annoyingly good book, I won't."
Tim Moore
"Weaving the history of the old road with the colour and the characters of today, Steve proves that any journey is an adventure if you know where to look."
Alastair Humphreys
"An enjoyable ode to a road that cyclists planning a trip will love, with entertaining nuggets of trivia and history for anyone who has ever hit the A1 for a long drive. Silk is a man on a mission, snaking alongside the main carriages on his winding passage by bike north via many a cafe and old coaching inn (many of which Charles Dickens visited, apparently). This journey may just give the lockdown Lycra brigade ideas."
Tom Chesshyre
"I love this book. I love the idea of considering something as mundane and utilitarian as the A1(M) in a fascinating, historical context. Who knew that behind this seemingly endless snake of concrete and tarmac lies the makings of a fabulous journey of pilgrimage? It is a joy to learn about the background to Steve's journey and to follow him as he makes his way along his very own Great North Road."
Rachel Ann Cullen
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
Copyright Steve Silk, 2021
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.
Steve Silk has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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CONTENTS
Central London to Stevenage
Stevenage to Sawtry
Sawtry to South Witham
South Witham to Austerfield
Austerfield to Wetherby
Wetherby to Northallerton
Northallerton to Sunderland Bridge
Sunderland Bridge to Cramlington
Cramlington to Seahouses
Seahouses to Dunbar
Dunbar to Edinburgh
PREFACE
One hundred years ago, the most famous road in Britain ceased to exist. The Ministry of Transport had declared that numbers were the future, not names. So the Great North Road the highway used down the ages by kings, queens, government troops, retreating rebels, pack horses, drovers, stage coaches, highwaymen, footpads, mail coaches, Penny Farthings and early motor cars was quietly steered onto history's hard shoulder. In the summer of 1921, the A1 was born.
Under its new title, the old road has gone from strength to crash-barriered strength. Over the last century it's hard to remember a time when the A1 wasn't being widened, improved or upgraded. Now many a memory of the old days lies crushed beneath vast quantities of reinforced concrete and tarmac. More than half of the highway's 400 miles are effectively a motorway the A1(M), a contradiction in terms.
Nonetheless, the original name has refused to die. Villagers from Hertfordshire in England to East Lothian in Scotland still talk about how their main road used to be part of a greater whole. At some deeper level the idea of a Great North Road remains embedded in the British psyche, even if the modern reality is rather more prosaic an overcrowded bypass just to the west of Baldock, for example. Physical remnants survive too. There are stretches where the new has been built next to the old, rather than on top of it: an orphaned mile or so in locations such as Tempsford in Bedfordshire, Stilton in Cambridgeshire or Cromwell in Nottinghamshire. Stand on one of these forgotten high streets and it's remarkably easy to visualise a time when the mail coach was the king of the road the horses' hooves clattering and the guard blowing his horn.
The Great North Road Savour those four words. For reasons that I can't quite explain, the compass point is important. Which proper traveller can resist a road sign with a crisp, white arrow pointing to "The North" in nononsense sans-serif?
The concept of numbering roads had begun in France in the nineteenth century under Napoleon Bonaparte. Andr Michelin, the founder of the tyre company, later became a fan of these "N" or national roads radiating from Paris. Once he had made the system more organised over there, he tried to persuade the British government to adopt it. After the First World War, he won over the Director-General of Roads in the newly created Ministry of Transport. By 1921 Sir Henry Maybury had decided to take the plunge. The top six highways would be spokes from London, the next three would have Edinburgh as their hub. There was some argument over the precise order. At one point the Portsmouth Road was going to be the A2 rather than the A3; similarly, the Bath Road would have been designated the A3 rather than the A4. But all agreed which road would be the first among equals. The Great North Road had to become the A1 it was the longest, the grandest and the only one to run from capital to capital. It took a while for the system to catch on. Earlier in 1921 the Berwickshire News had confidently reported that the highway between London and Edinburgh was to be called "Road Number 1". However, by July civil servants were writing their memos and by October mapping companies were preparing to update their charts with the new A-road designations. In 1921, Britain bade farewell to The Great North Road.
My first experience of the A1 came as a 19-year-old student bound for Newcastle from London via the National Express coach service. With an elongated sports bag in one hand and a standard-issue 1980s ghetto-blaster in the other, I saw the road as never-ending and the coach as simply the cheapest way of getting from A to B.
Over the next four years I rode it, car-shared it, hitch-hiked it and drove it. I stopped at all the services and despaired at all the road works. But, slowly, the A1 started to seep into my soul. My first job was as a newspaper reporter in Darlington, using it to cover the misdemeanours of Catterick squaddies at Richmond Magistrates' Court or record the results of the "Best Cow with Calf at Feet" competition at a myriad of agricultural shows. Later, armed with a company car and a slightly better cut of suit, I patrolled the Peterborough patch as a regional TV reporter. All the time the A1 was expanding eating up an ever-larger hinterland. Perhaps perversely, its quirks and its history were revealing themselves too. This wasn't a modern road suddenly imposed upon the landscape (like that American upstart Route 66); it was the latest incarnation of a highway pieced together over centuries.
