The idea for London’s Skycycle, an elevated cycleway, is nothing new. There was one in Pasadena at the end of the 1890s, with plans for it to slope down to Los Angeles. Similarly, the Thames Deckway, a mooted £600m floating […]
Continue ReadingPortland Place in London is now crammed with cars and could be easily turned into a genuinely multi-use street. It’s certainly wide enough, and has been this wide since it was built in the 1770s. Lots of London’s streets are […]
Continue ReadingDaniel Defoe, author of the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, was a great traveller and, in 1724-6, wrote A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain, divided into circuits or journies, a valuable source of information for historians. Defoe had […]
Continue ReadingThis is Hanover Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, close to the Quayside, and once lined with bonded warehouses. The road was constructed in about 1841. Most of the road is made up of small granite setts but, to aid horses […]
Continue ReadingViewed from a windscreen, roads look as though they were built for cars and trucks. Britain’s motorways and the elevated arterial road systems of the 1960s and 1970s seem to bear this out but such car-centric highways are the exception […]
Continue ReadingI’m writing a book about the US and UK cyclist organisations of the 1880s and 1890s which lobbied for good roads – and got them – before the motorcar came along and stole their thunder. ‘Roads Were Not Built For […]
Continue Reading