The road that built England

New Statesman​

23-04-2025

Photo by Charles Hewitt/Picture Post/Whenever the A1 road is widened to accommodate ever more traffic, to become the A1(M), archaeological work must be undertaken and, to no one's surprise, skeletons emerge. The North Road opens with its author at Catterick, working with a trowel to unearth long-dead Romans. After all, the A1 began as Ermine Street, built to give the Romans access to York. And, as every schoolkid knows, the Romans built good roads. In the 1700s, Daniel Defoe wrote that a section he travelled was still 'paved in stone', which is to say, original.
Now it is four lanes of tarmac, of course. Or whatever modern roads are surfaced with (ideas of surfacing and resurfacing recur in this book). For most people, most of the time, it's just a way of driving from A to B; a continuous lorry-scape. But for Rob Cowen, over his decade of research, the Great North Road became a kind of Earth god. His excavations led to a many-layered, multi-textured exploration of the whole road, and slippages of time are his forte. He travels south to north, discovering and exhuming ghosts and presences along the way. It's all there, on the A1, from Roman skulls to Covid.
Like the source of a great river, its starting place is a little doubtful. Most agree on Smithfield, the meat market where droves of animals died. From there, the road lights out through London's medieval Bishopsgate and into a strange and fascinating land. Cowen's explorations, what we might term psychogeography, were often done on foot. Wisely perhaps, he trekked in the company of a friend who is a soldier, timing his walks with his friend's home leave. The two often camped within earshot of the road, often in ghastly weather. Foxes barked, wind lashed the trees, the stories and the interest kept coming. Everyone crowds the road, and also these pages: St Cuthbert, William the Conqueror (or William the Bastard, if you were a native), Oliver Cromwell, Dick Turpin, the postal service, even TS Eliot. Cowen calls Eliot the 'great poet of the Great North Road' and Four Quartets a 'highway hymn'. ( Little Gidding lies a little west of the highway.)
There are many personages whose names we know, as well as the nameless dead, but Cowen also notes that the A1 has secret encampments. North of London, migrant workers sleep in roadside woods before they slip back into the city to labour. There are mouthy barmaids, strip malls, graffiti and the never-ending traffic; all the stuff of our own strange century. The Iraq War features, and Brexit. As for Covid, the 'Kent variant' spread itself upcountry via the Great North Road.
Though the book is richly historical, Cowen's North Road is also personal. He has never lived more than a few miles from it. He has young children, and understands that the road's archaeological and temporal layers are made of families like his own. They really were his own: one of the book's strata concerns his Cowen forebears, generations who were miners, shopkeepers and fishmongers, and who trudged up and down between Doncaster and the Smoke as their fortunes waxed and waned. Economic migrants, we'd now say. Another layer concerns his teenage years and the emotional shutdown he went into after his parents' divorce when he was 16. With friends he formed a band, they went gigging and drinking up and down the same A1, hoping it would be the road to fame and freedom. Having involved himself in the music industry, he moved to London, and recalls how in 2005, following the bombings when 52 people were killed and the transport systems shut down, he joined the crowds trudging home on foot. It was, he notes, the Great North Road that he followed.
It's strange to think that, for 1,900 of its 2,000 years, the Great North Road had no motor traffic. For 1,600 of its years, there was not even a stagecoach. When the coach was introduced, along with it came inns and stables and staging posts. Many still exist, albeit half-forgotten where the road's route has shifted to bypass villages. Cowen seeks them out, ghostly places sometimes. The stagecoach dominated until competition arrived in the shape of the first postal service. These new, faster 'night mails' were all dark glamour – lamplit and pulled by plunging horses. The guard at the back was, Cowen writes, like a rock star: 'think Mick Jagger in 1968, bedecked in scarlet coat with blue lapels'. De Quincey travelled by night mail: 'Bagging a seat by the driver as these coaches tore up the highway was, in De Quincey's estimation, 'worth five years of life'.' In 1600, it took four days to get from London to York. By 1830, it took a mere 20 hours. But then the railway came, supplanting horses, and soon to be supplanted in turn by motor traffic and its ever-increasing demands – hence the present 'upgrades' to A1(M) status, and the Roman skeletons.
Gradually, we edge north; that is the way the road runs. No one in Edinburgh speaks of a 'Great South Road' although many took it, not least James VI (and I), heading for London and the English crown. Cowen writes that the king on his journey was entertained most lavishly at Huntingdon by one Oliver Cromwell, uncle of the parliamentarian. Cromwell the younger was likewise a child of the North Road, and he features in a chapter entitled 'Leave/Remain'. Again time slips. 'One of the most striking disclosures from the Brexit vote has been its sporadic echoes of the civil wars… unquiet history stares us in the face. Brexit burst into flame from sparks struck over similar tinder.'
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For the length of the road, 'its present tense and its mirroring of past tensions' are vividly explored. The sheer amount of material Cowen amasses would overwhelm many, but he handles it deftly. His writing is vivid, elastic, driven on like a stagecoach with many a verbless sentence. He stretches the bounds of 'non-fiction' with sections spoken in voices he discovers along the way, of people from other times. There is the imagined testimony of James Hind, highwayman and royalist, 'dictated' in 17th-century English somewhere between Ickwell Green and Huntingdon. There is a marvellous multi-page prose poem spoken by the genius loci of Stretton: 'the road changes. It grows wider, thicker… shadows upon shadows… I see things I can't be sure of. Flashes. The road overgrown. Crops burning. Smoke on the horizon… I have no sense of time as you do… time is not as you understand it. I wait…' We could be in the Roman invasion, the Norman conquest, the civil war, the future.
The North Road is a wonderful achievement. There have been gazetteers and motorists' guides, but this is different. With its voices and histories, its excitements and discoveries, its memoir and its sense of time circling back even as it heads north at 70mph. Cowen writes: 'Is it not to try and restore some sense of enchantment that we are out here walking the road?' Enchantment is restored. And in doing that, Cowen has perhaps found his country's elusive sense of identity. It resides not in landscape or football or a National Trust garden, but in an ever-changing, ever-active, thundering dual carriageway. It begins in uncertainty and ends in a different nation. Brilliantly, The North Road is everything. It is 'England and nowhere'.
Rob Cowen appears at Cambridge Literary Festival on 26 April
The North Road
Rob Cowen
Hutchinson Heinemann, 416pp, £22
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Steve Reed: 'Reform is a symptom of broken trust']
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