Sensing the past along Britain’s A roads

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to explore the particular characteristics of British A-roads by focusing upon a motoring journey from Slough to Torquay. This trip was undertaken as part of an extended motoring adventure by two Indian tourists in 1955, and exactly the same route was followed in 2023 by the authors. Informed by the interviews and records of the tourists, we scrutinized the infrastructure of the A-roads along which we travelled, as well as the roadside features and the wider landscape beyond. In becoming sensorially and affectively attuned to the distinctive qualities of these roads by the memories of the tourists and our own impressions, we underline how motoring opens up diverse experiences of mobility and roadscape according to the motivations and purpose of journeys, the particular landscape traversed through, the attunements of the car’s inhabitants, and the infrastructural and formal characteristics of the road. Further, we emphasize how the details we identify disclose how roads and motoring are saturated with recollections of other people, our own prior journeys by car and mediatized memories. Above all, we argue, the material signifiers of past function and experience that are encountered offer powerful evidence that roadscapes are ever-changing, dynamic realms, culturally and historically shaped in myriad ways.