by Tom Fort
‘The purpose of motorways,’ Drake wrote, ‘is fairly obvious. They should provide safer travelling, they should reduce the time taken to make the journey, and they should carry more traffic’ At that time the possibility of an inherent contradiction between the second and third axioms did not occur to anyone.
In March 1958 the Conservative Transport Minister, Harold Watkinson – described by Joe Moran in his terrific book On Roads as ‘the first politician to see the votes in motorways’ – blew a horn to inaugurate the building of the M1. At the end of that year the prime minister himself, Harold Macmillan, opened the first stretch of British motorway, the Preston bypass (which would form part of the M6). Two years later, work began on the M4, and two years after that the first section of the M5 was opened. In 1962 Watkinson’s successor, the irrepressible Ernest Marples, promised a thousand miles of motorway over the next ten years. By 1966 it was possible to drive on motorway from London to Birmingham, much of the way from London to Leeds, and across the Severn Bridge into Wales. A year later responsibility for planning, building and maintaining motorways and trunk roads was transferred from the county councils to the Ministry of Transport.
The eyes of the planners and the engineers roamed far and wide. Among the routes on which they rested from time to time was the A303. Although the M5 was well on its way to penetrating the south-west, it was really a western highway. Even when married with the M4 it would represent a very long way round for motorists on the southern and eastern sides of London who were anxious to taste the delights of Devon and Cornwall.
Something better was needed. An old dream, of a London–Penzance trunk road, began to shimmer alluringly on the horizon once more.
2
THE ROAD TO MANDERLEY?
The question for students and critics of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is: did the second Mrs de Winter and her creepy husband take the A303 to get to his ‘secretive and silent’ Cornish hideaway? The best I can offer is that they might have done.
There are not many clues. As newlyweds they leave London in the morning and arrive at the house in time for tea at five, but there is nothing about signposts or map references. Subsequently, driving from Cornwall with stuffy Colonel Julyan, they stop for lunch ‘in one of those inevitable hotels on the main street of a county town’ where the colonel puts away soup, fish and a roast. Since they reach the suburbs of London by three o’clock, we can assume that he laid down his napkin not later than two hours from the capital. This could place the old-fashioned hotel in Amesbury or Andover on the A303 (each had the George), or in Salisbury (a very early lunch) or Stockbridge (the Grosvenor in the High Street would fit the bill) on the A30. Basingstoke, Bagshot, Egham and Staines – other likely lunching venues on the A30 – can, I think, be ruled out on the grounds that they do not really qualify as country towns.
When Mr and Mrs de Winter – without Colonel Julyan – return from extracting Rebecca’s dark secrets from Dr Baker in Barnet, they leave a restaurant in Soho at quarter to eight in the evening. Maxim de Winter says they should reach Manderley by half past two in the morning. ‘There won’t be much traffic on the road,’ he forecasts. But which road? She, annoyingly, sleeps instead of reading the map. They stop at a garage where a bitter wind blows. I like to think that this was a Salisbury Plain wind – it is autumn, when the Plain winds can be bitter indeed. That would put the garage on the A303–Amesbury? Mere? Wincanton? – but I concede that the inference is tenuous.
Certainly de Winter would have been aware that he had a choice of route. Motoring west from central London he would have taken the Great West Road as far as Hounslow, then the A30 through Staines, Egham and Bagshot and on beyond Basingstoke to a junction near Micheldever railway station. Here the A303 forked right to Andover and the A30 slipped south towards Stockbridge and Salisbury. The two roads thus framed to the north and south a segment of land about eighty-five miles long and shaped like a toucan’s beak, before coming together again near Honiton. There the A303 became defunct, as it still does, while the A30 continued to Exeter and eventually Penzance.
When Daphne du Maurier was first enchanted by Cornwall and its coast in the 1920s, the vast, tedious task of numbering Britain’s more important roads had been completed, on paper at least. But it took some years for the numbers to reach road signs and maps. A Geographia cloth road map for south-west England and south Wales – dating from about 1926 – classifies both the A303 and the A30 as Class 1 (A) Ministry of Transport Roads, without numbers. The A303 officially came into existence on 1 April 1933, but the maps did not hurry to catch up. The 1937 Roadmaster map of England, Wales and Scotland– ‘specially designed for motoring’ and ‘prepared according to the Berquvist Easy Reference system’ – designated both roads as first class, with their numbers but without the A’. The map attached to the Trunks Road Act of 1936 showed the A30 as the route to the west, with the A303 nowhere.
If de Winter was following Ministry of Transport advice, he would definitely have taken the A30 via Salisbury. But he might have known better. Even then – the novel was written in 1937 – traffic jams were becoming a familiar problem, and the likeliest place to encounter them was where a main road had to squeeze and twist itself through the centre of a busy town on a course designed for carts and horse-drawn carriages. It may well be – I put it no more strongly – that having got through Staines, Egham and Bagshot, he quailed at the prospect of Salisbury and Yeovil, not to mention Shaftesbury, Sherborne and Chard.
It’s also possible that he had a copy of the National Road Book compiled by R.T. Lang and published in 1936. This indispensable volume contained, in a way characteristic of its age, an address to ‘the Good Companions of the Road, helping each other along the ways in that good nature and cheerful spirit which is bred by love of the countryside’. Dealing with the task of getting from London to Land’s End, Lang recommended leaving the A30 at Basingstoke, taking the old coach road via Overton to Andover, then forking left onto the A303 for a ‘wild, open run across Salisbury Plain’ and on to Honiton – ‘a direct and mostly falling road through what Defoe called “the most beautiful landskip in the world”’. Who could resist such an invitation?
Nevertheless, on the trunk road map that accompanied Alfred Barnes’ statement on future plans to Parliament in 1946, the A30 remained the senior route to the west. But within a few years officials looked at the situation again. They noticed that the A30 was afflicted with an undue number of town centre bottlenecks, and they decided that the less encumbered A303 might be a better bet. The AA Roadbook of 1957 advised motorists heading from London to Cornwall to turn from the A30 onto the A303 at Micheldever. On 1 April the London Gazette recorded that the A303 – as far as it went – was hitherto to be regarded as the trunk road to Penzance.
Since then, the A303 has always been the favoured of the two sisters. Despite being much longer and much more steeped in history, the A30 was left to meander between the old coaching stops that had once nourished it, rarely chosen for major improvements, neglected and overlooked, condemned by its largely single-carriageway status to be loathed and despised by the motorists forced to use it. The A303, in contrast, was spoiled and pampered. Andover and Amesbury got their bypasses, and stretches east and west of Andover were converted to dual carriageway, with a link near Basingstoke to the M3. By the mid-1980s a gleaming highway stretched to Amesbury, while further on a string of towns and villages – including Wylye, Mere and Wincanton – had been graced with dual-carriageway bypasses.
The assumption underlying the piecemeal upgrading of the A303 was that one day all these stretches of smart new road would be unified into a great arterial route to Exeter; and eventually from Exeter onwards. That was the dream.
3
HESTON SERVICES
T. S. Eliot’s celebrated musings on ends and beginnings in Four Quartets – ‘In my beginning is my end . . .’ and ‘. . . in my end is my beginning’ – are highly suggestive of roads. For all I know they may even have been
suggested to him by the A303. They occur in the second of the poems, ‘East Coker’, which Eliot named after the village near Yeovil where his ancestors came from. It is entirely possible that when he first visited it in 1937, he used the pre-war A303 to get there from London.1
For the Exeter man with business in London, the A303 begins a few miles east of Honiton and ends when it meets the M3 south-west of Basingstoke. For the Londoner whose soul yearns for the wooded dales of Somerset, the purple heights of Exmoor or Dartmoor, or the crashing surf of Cornwall, it is the other way round. Neither end, neither beginning, can claim precedence over the other. But it makes sense for a narrative about a road to move generally in one direction or the other, which is how I have organised this one. The alternative would be either a degree of topographical to-ing and fro-ing that would rapidly become irritating, or even a second, back-to-front version of the whole thing. My choice to go east to west was a matter of convenience for me, no more. I would not want anyone to interpret it as implying condescension towards those whose conception of the road is the reverse. After all, most of us end up driving back the way we came.
I have tried to imagine this road as a river, flowing through time as well as space, shaping the landscape, accepting tributary roads as it goes, its story composed of itself and the stories of those who have lived and died on it, and travelled it. I am aware that the analogy is far from exact: that, for instance, a river starts as a trickle and keeps growing, is born in high ground and is extinguished by the sea, must go downhill and downhill only, and is possessed by a one-way force. But I still see a likeness, and in both cases exploration requires location of a source.
This can be tricky with a river. It’s not always easy to tell which spring or which puddle caught in some boggy upland has primacy. Sometimes – as with the Danube – there are two competing branches, and the arguments over which is the senior rumble for centuries. With the eastern end of the A303 there is also a degree of – shall we say? – mystery.
On the map it emerges from a lopped branch of the M3, standing out to the right as the motorway curves from the south-western edge of Basingstoke towards Winchester. There are slip roads either side of this stump. The northern one provides access for eastbound traffic onto the A30 into Basingstoke (curiously, the A30 as a westbound proposition ceases to exist altogether at this point, but springs back to life several miles away as an offshoot of the southbound A34). It is on the southern slip road – leading from the M3 to the A303 – where the search for the source must be concentrated.
Getting close
You are driving west along the M3. You pass a junction that leads in one direction to the A30 into Basingstoke, and in the other to Dummer, home of the Duchess of York’s late, louche and luxuriantly eyebrowed father, Major Ronald Ferguson (but let’s not be distracted). Soon after this junction, a sign summons you to consider the A303. An invitation is also inscribed across the road surface. You deviate left. The slip road arcs past field and woodland and back under the M3. The blue colouring of the marker posts indicate that this is still classified as motorway. But which motorway? Is it still M3? Or could it be unidentified M303? Or should it be A303(M)? I said it was a mystery; I didn’t say it was an interesting mystery.
The Highways Agency does not tell, and anyway in a moment or two limbo-way ends with a sign showing a thick red diagonal line across the motorway blue. This is the beginning of the A303 (or, for the last time, the end). You may now legally mount a horse, start pedalling a bike, set forth on a scooter, or walk. None of these methods of locomotion is to be recommended. Fortunately Basingstoke Crematorium, with its chapel, its neat rows of tablets to the departed, its lawns and groves of trees and memorial pond and splashing fountain, and its thoroughly modern facilities for disposing of the victims of accidents, is very close at hand.
In terms of scale and the speed of traffic, this newborn A303 is hardly distinguishable from the motorway that sends it forth into the world. There is one important difference, however, (apart from the rules allowing horses and so forth). There is no hard shoulder, no lane of refuge for the halt and the lame and the punctured. Instead there are lay-bys. The first of many soon appears.
Our lay-bys are not intended as places to linger. The British lay-by does not lead – as its equivalent in France may do – to a bosky clearing suitable for rest and picnicking. It is a stingy affair, shallow and rarely even offering protection in the form of a screen of shrubs or trees from the racket and pressure waves produced by the traffic blasting past. The traveller who wishes to eat, rest or make a phone call is advised to stay in the car. The traveller wishing to urinate or have a crap must take his or her chance in the undergrowth. Facilities are minimal, often restricted to a rubbish bin, less often including a noticeboard on which is displayed what is euphemistically referred to as Tourist Information about the locality.
Law of the lay-by
There is usually another sign, of the bossyboots variety, telling you to take your litter home with you. Perversely these are generally placed next to the rubbish bin. The message is thus confused. Are you supposed to use the bin only if you are not going home, or if you have no home? Or are you supposed to divide your litter, leaving some and taking some away? Judging by the amount invariably distributed all around these cheerless places, many people – perhaps understandably – have decided to chuck it on the ground rather than grapple with these difficult questions.
Ancient monument
Beyond the bin and the bossy sign in the A303’s first lay-by is a small, pale, upright object with a rounded top, which turns out to be a minor and overlooked national treasure. It’s a milestone installed in the 1760s to inform passing travellers that they were 53 miles from London, 14 miles from Stockbridge and 7 miles from Basingstoke. The fact that it appears in the British Listed Buildings Schedule is, I think, rather marvellous. What trouble we still take over tiny relics of our past. There it stands, this stubby fragment of transport history, and I doubt if anyone pauses to inspect it from one year to the next. But some dedicated architectural historian from English Heritage has taken the trouble to record its details and praise it as ‘a good example of eighteenth-century milestone’. Eight furlongs further on – or 1760 yards if you prefer – there is another, with the distances appropriately adjusted. But there are no more on the A303 after that, because the old turnpike road then veers south in search of Stockbridge.
By then the traveller on the A303 has sped past, or yielded to, the temptations of the road’s first contemporary version of the coaching inn of old. This announces itself with a sign displaying a plump, elfish fellow with a perky grin, a hanky tied in a knot around his neck, and an outsize chefs hat at a jaunty angle on his head. Elsewhere – but not here at Popham, because there is no room on the sign – he is shown holding up a warming dish with a cover on it shaped like a perfectly rounded breast and nipple. With or without the warming dish, his business is clear. His name is Fat Charlie and if you care to listen, he can tell you a good deal about the nation’s eating habits.
Fat Charlie says hello
Fat Charlie is the logo and mascot of the Little Chef chain of roadside diners. Just the mention of Little Chef is enough to bring on an attack of queasy snobbishness among the newly food-conscious, and to rouse the plump and bilious food critic to spasms of disgust. The cream-and-red livery, the hats and uniforms, the formica tables and plastic-covered benches, the clusters of cruets and the laminated menus embody a small-town culinary philistinism that shames the extra vergine classes. And the food! Where else but Little Chef could you have found the Hunter’s Chicken marinated in BBQ spices and served with a slice of cheddar cheese and crispy bacon? Or the tuna and chicken cheese melt? The Works flame-grilled burger and the chicken breast in batter ‘on a bed of tangy relish, mixed leaves and tomato’, served with chips or jacket potato? Who else but Little Chef could have proclaimed the Knickerbocker Glory as ‘the taste of long summer afternoons in a glass’?
By rights Li
ttle Chef should long ago have gone the same way as Watney’s Red Barrel beer and the turkey twizzler. But somehow it clings to its niche, because it offers a particular kind of person what they want in particular circumstances, and there are just enough of them to keep it going, although not as many as there used to be – in January 2012, 67 Little Chef outlets were closed. And Fat Charlie is more than just the creation of a design department. He has a life of his own and a place in the public’s affection. A few years ago, after an upheaval in the ownership of the chain, a slimmer, semi-skimmed version of Fat Charlie was introduced, considered by some buzzy, finger-snapping PR sharpshooter to be more in keeping with growing consciousness about healthy eating. There was an outcry from Little Chefs constituency, and Full Fat Charlie was restored.
In summer 2009 he underwent a more subtle image change. He lost his neckerchief and took to sporting a bumfreezer chefs jacket with four buttons on the front. Not many realised it, but Charlie was aping a new and improbable mentor. By then Little Chef had acquired a jargon-spouting Christian evangelist named Ian Pegler as chief executive. As well as the good book, Pegler believed in the mystic power of PR, and his great coup was to recruit Heston Blumenthal, the genius of the Fat Duck restaurant in Bray and the Zeus among Olympian kitchen gods, to bring Little Chefs moribund laminated menu to life. Channel Four were on board for a TV programme about his involvement, and the ‘eatery’ at Little Popham was chosen as location for the rescue mission.
So Heston and his team journeyed from Berkshire to Hampshire to goggle in amazement at Little Chef staples such as the Mega Mixed Grill (rump steak, chicken breast, gammon, onion rings, chips) and squawk like outraged virgins at the horrible things done with microwaves. Over three nights on prime-time TV they were shown dragging Popham’s willing but ignorant staff into the age of braised ox cheeks and rope-grown Scottish mussels.
