On This Day: M1 opens as Britain’s first motorway

NOVEMBER 2, 1959: Britain’s first long-distance motorway opened on this day in 1959 after the first section of the M1 was built.

The initial 72 miles of the triple carriageway between Watford and Rugby - or junctions 5 to18 – was seen as a revolutionary development in British transport.

The high-speed highway cut journey times between the two by almost an hour as well as alleviating congestion on trunk roads and streets in towns.

A British Pathé newsreel commemorating its opening to traffic, which – to the astonishment of viewers today – consisted of just a few cars.

It also showed the “ultra-modern” signposting, which had been redesigned to use easier-to-read lower-case lettering instead of traditional block capitals used until then.

The footage also shows the slip roads and flyover roundabouts that made exiting the motorway easy and was seen as a radical innovation.

On the same day, the first service station was opened at Watford Gap, which despite common misconceptions is actually 70 miles north of Watford, Hertfordshire.

The M1’s building followed the piecemeal construction of the M6, which began as the Preston Bypass in December 1958.

Within a decade the M1 was 193 miles long after being extended south to London and north to Leeds.

It was linked at Rugby to the M6, which at 230 miles long became the UK’s longest motorway and – in combination – form the so-called Backbone of Britain.

The M6 hitches to the A74(M) in Scotland and finally the M74 all the way to Glasgow, meaning London was linked by rapid roads to all  of Britain’s major cities.

In the early days, the M1 did not have crash barriers, lighting or even a speed limit.

Planners, who were inspired by autostradas begun in fascist Italy in the 1920s and the later autobahns of Nazi Germany, designed it to cope with 13,000 cars a day.

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It is now used by more than 140,000 and is undergoing a building programme to widen many sections of the motorway to four lanes in either direction.

Road lobbyists have criticised both the width of motorways in Britain and the length of the network, which at 2,200 miles is less than a third of Germany’s 7,680 miles.

Unlike other European countries, however, road building has often been stymied by both government reluctance to pay for new infrastructure and public protests.

Many experts, including Professor Stephen Glaister of the RAC Foundation, say the solution is to follow France and build more toll roads.

But they are deeply unpopular in Britain – in part because the country’s drivers already pay £48billion a year in motoring taxes.