In Flashes of Doubt  – set in 1962 Britain – we get a glimpse of the thoughts of William Arnold as he remembers the warning his father had given him years earlier about the rise and rise of the motor car.

The route William used to take each workday, from his cottage in Burton Street to the newspaper offices, had been so ingrained in him he could have done it with his eyes shut. He always left early enough to drop into the newsagent’s on the way, exchange a few words with his friend, and still get to work before the rest of the staff. It was one of his favourite times, that first half hour or so, when he had the place to himself, when he could mentally prepare for his day, with no one to disturb him.

But now, even though the journey from the bedsit was shorter, it seemed his leg tired more quickly. And increasingly, he’d have to wait to cross the road because of early morning traffic.

He recalled the day his father pointed out a motorcar parked at the end of their street. It was such a rare sight back then, something only the wealthy few could indulge in.

‘You see that, son?’ his father said.

A horse-led tram passed by just at that moment, causing Mr Arnold to smile.

‘One day everyone will move from place to place in one of those,’ he said, gesturing past the tram towards the motorcar.

William was just seven years old. He was struggling to follow the drift of his father’s words.

‘By the time you’re a young man,’ his father continued, ‘there will be cars up and down this road, every road. You mark my words.’

His father was right, of course, although perhaps it didn’t happen quite as quickly as Mr Arnold had predicted. But now, in 1962, William had to be cautious each time he wanted to cross a road. The black and white Zebra crossings were commonplace, but the authorities had decided something else was needed. They were introducing something called a ‘Panda’ crossing. They trialled the idea at various locations, with the first one being outside the railway station at London Waterloo. The new Panda crossings involved a sequence of pulsating and flashing lights guiding pedestrians and motorists as to when they should move and when they should stay put. It seemed like an unnecessarily complex approach. If the new Panda crossings made their way to Hastings, William would work out ways to avoid them entirely.

The rise in car ownership in the post-war years affected many countries across the globe. In America the state intervened with the creation of a 42,800 mile interstate highway programme, sparking the so-called ‘freeway revolt’, with dissenters arguing it laid waste to communities built across generations…displacing hundreds of thousands in cities across the nation. What was deemed to be urban renewal and slum clearance destroyed land sacred to indigenous people creating new barriers that isolated and contained poor people of colour and sparked racial divisions throughout subsequent decades.

Speaking in 1959, Birmingham’s City engineer, Manzoni, echoed the fears of others that the rise in car ownership had dire implications for society. ‘Urban traffic congestion’ he suggested, was ‘one of the biggest problems …civilisation [would face] in the next decade’.

Post-war Britain faced its own particular challenges. By 1951 ‘Britain was …one of the most densely populated countries on the planet’, a situation which increased over the following decades, with London being ‘in danger of choking’. The post-war baby boom and extensive immigration from the Commonwealth led to a significant increase in the British population and alongside people, there were cars.

In the three decades after the Second World War the number of vehicles in Britain tripled. In 1963, Anthony Wedgewood Benn argued ‘car production… [had] become the prime index for measuring economic growth’; the economy needed cars, and cars needed roads.

Space had to be apportioned, amid the conflicting desires of politicians, economists, urban planners, motorists, employers, workers, and families, each with their own priorities. People needed homes, but the 1950s political priority for slum clearance and council house building would soon be challenged by the 1960s need to resolve the ‘problem of roads and traffic’.

One of the ways the British government looked to resolve the challenge of how best to apportion space was to create new towns, moving people away from inner cities. Following the New Towns Act of 1946, some thirty new towns were created over subsequent decades. Looking ahead to the implications of these new towns and new housing estates, Young and Wilmott’s sociological studies of 1950s London’s East End highlighted anxieties that moving people away from the inner cities would fracture existing communal solidarities.

Not all historians agree with Young and Wilmott’s idea of ‘community’. Some argue that the concept was no more than a nostalgic perception, where people were ‘obliged by economic necessity and overcrowding to live on intimate terms with their neighbours’. Others have asked if there was such a thing as community prior to the Second World War, or whether it was no more than a useful noun to encompass ‘the lie and gloss of togetherness’ and that to achieve a comprehensive definition of community is like ‘juggling with jelly’.

Whatever community meant, or even if it existed in any generic sense, some historians suggest the idea of it was at least one of a range of drivers for urban planners when constructing new towns. Silkin, minister for town and country planning in Atlee’s post-war government, promised that new towns would be places where ‘all classes of community can meet freely together on equal terms and enjoy common cultural and recreational facilities’. The reality was often quite different.

In 1957, British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, assured the British public they had ‘never had it so good’. A buoyant economy, increased exports, steel production and importantly, car manufacturing, led to increased affluence for many and a chance to benefit from the influx of consumer goods from the US. Urban planners captured the opportunity this new affluence provided by designing British new towns as sites of experiment that would offer ‘consumer-citizens’ easy access to shops and leisure pursuits.

In Sheffield’s Park Hill and Killingworth, for example, tower blocks were grouped to provide ‘streets in the air’ in an attempt to provide what was perceived to be ‘the neighbourly warmth of the old rotten rows’, ‘replicating the conditions of Britain’s terraced working-class housing with their tight-knit bonds of conviviality’. Tenants were told they would be moving into a ‘vertical village’, its overt intention to encourage the growth of a community. Critics of such an approach argued that such ‘bogus sociology’ was based on an assumption that ‘proximity would create more community-conscious residents’.

Community and neighbourliness were not always the overt focus. Plans for Milton Keynes, were said to ‘embrace the car’ by constructing a town comprising a series of grid squares, each containing its own community facilities with the intention of bringing people together through shared interests, rather than shared space.

Some historians have challenged Young and Wilmott’s conclusions, describing it as ‘cottage industry sociology’, pointing out that culture and lifestyle changed much less with the move out to suburban Essex than Young and Wilmott suggested and that rather than disappearing, community evolved into something based on shared interests, rather than neighbourliness.

Of course, not everyone was affected in the same way by the rise of the motor car. Research has shown that many working-class women were left stranded in cities that had been designed around the motor car as in 1964, barely ten percent of women on council estates had a driving licence.

In Britain, from the 1930s onwards, play streets provided an important social function for many working-class communities. When faced with the spread of automobility, women argued cars were ‘illegitimate travellers through their streets’. Demonstrations, such as the ‘barricade of babies’ and ‘the battle of Hardwick Street’, railed against drivers who had ‘no legitimate business’ on streets that had previously been safe social spaces for women and children. The demonstrations gained significant media attention, but sadly without lasting success. And by the late 1970s, the landscape seemed to echo the words of Bishop Huddleston, who observed that ‘Britain preferred motor cars to children’, an opinion also reflected in an earlier advert for the Mini, which showed the car ‘parked in a child’s bedroom like a surrogate family member.’

The car was soon seen as an index of affluence, a social necessity linked to social status, with car ownership beginning to replace house ownership as the expression of men’s sense of independence and self-respect. Garages were being favoured over gardens, with the car depicted ‘as a family pet, housed in its own special kennel-garage’.

Rolling forward to current times, the competition for space between people and vehicles continues, compounded by concerns about environmental pollution from fuel emissions, as well as ongoing pressures from population growth and migration.

My next post – More and more and more – will be considering the frightening significance of economic growth on climate issues!

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• To continuing exploring the topic, take a look at:
• Krista Cowman. “Play Streets: Women, Children and the Problem of Urban Traffic, 1930-1970”, Social History 42, no 2, 2017.
• Simon Gunn, “The Buchanan Report, Environment and the Problem of Traffic in 1960s Britain”, 20^th Century British History, 22,no 4, 2011.
• Simon Gunn, “People and the car: the expansion of automobility in urban Britain, c.1955-70”, Social History 38,no 2, 2013.
• David Kynaston. Family Britain – 1951-57. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010.
• Jon Lawrence. Me, Me, Me?:the search for community in post-war England. Oxford University Press, 2019.
• Jesse Meredith, “Decolonizing the New Town: Roy Gazzard and the Making of Killingworth Township”, Journal of British Studies 57,no. 2, 2018.
• G.U.Y. Ortolano, “Planning the Urban Future in 1960s Britain”, The Historical Journal 54,no. 2, 2011.
• Tim Verlaan, “Mobilization of the Masses: Dutch Planners, Local Politics, and the Threat of the Motor Age 1960-1980”, Journal of Urban History 47, no 1, 2021.
• Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London.Taylor & Francis Group, 2011.

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