Memories of motorway days out with neither traffic nor roadworks

The first US freeway, connecting Pasadena to Los Angeles, opened in 1940, and in the course of the next decade and a half, Austria, France, Belgium, Denmark and Poland could boast at least one stretch of motorway. Germany had more than the others put together.

But it was not until the end of the 1950s that the three-lane highways and blue signs which have been a feature of life ever since, became part of the British landscape.

Plans had been drawn up during the war for a high-speed road network, but it took until November 1959 for the Transport Minister, Ernest Marples, to be able to declare open the first 72m section of the M1. He did so using one of the police’s new-fangled radio telephones.

It was not the country’s first such road – the eight-mile Preston bypass had opened the previous year – but it was the first time drivers could travel long distances free of traffic lights, junctions and, for the time being, roadworks.

It would be another nine years before the M1 reached Leeds.

By 1972 the network stretched to 1,000m, but it was the 1980s that were the boom years for construction.

In the early days, the highways were novelties in themselves, and it was not unusual for families to make day trips just to eat lunch at one of the service stations whose silver service restaurants overlooked the carriageway. Watford Gap in Northamptonshire, which opened on the same day as the M1, was the first of the new breed and became renowned as the point at which the south-east gave way to the Midlands.

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