On Roads: A Hidden History by Joe Moran review

Administrator — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:36:06 +0000

I wasn’t sure that I would like On Roads at first, especially since I am of the persuasion that it’s a great shame that the motor car was invented so soon after the bicycle. However, Joe Moran soon won me over by regaling a great many fascinating anecdotes about the expansion of the British road network in the wake of the Second World War. As the back cover says, we don’t really think about the roads we use every day in great detail, and how we are connected to them. I, for one, was very happy to read the section about Slough, my home town, half way through the book, in which Moran expertly recounts why it has been unfairly denigrated: “the national disdain reserved for places like Slough is a mirror of the way we imagine the roadside, this place which is at the leading edge of economic change but also somehow marginalised and ‘boring’”. As Moran writes, Slough is the “grandfather of the big shed”; however, the shed in which Amazon.co.uk first located itself in Slough became overwhelmed quite rapidly, and thus I and many other Amazonians were relocated to the bigger shed near Milton Keynes that Moran mentions a few pages later. Despite the nostalgia arisen by Moran’s mentions of these two places to which I have such a personal connection, I am a bit sceptical about his notion that it would be a great idea if house builders adopted the construction methods of the big sheds, as Amazon’s big shed was too cold in winter and too hot in summer, at least at first. It’s amazing to witness Joe Moran’s great breadth of reading (although he didn’t have to go too far to read Rosemary Hill’s splendid Stonehenge, also published by Profile Books). All in all, On Roads is a very engaging read, and is possibly destined to become as much of a classic as the book from which the title is no doubt derived: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill

Administrator — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:46:05 +0000

This is a fascinating account of Stonehenge’s grip on the public imagination. Having recently wandered into The Circus, the circular street designed by John Wood in Bath, I was fascinated to discover that it had been influenced by the ancient monument, and that Wood’s work in turn influenced Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus. In addition to this, after recently reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (which explores Freemasonry in depth), I was intrigued to read that Inigo Jones believed that all classical architecture (such as Stonehenge) was derived from King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, since this is the building that Freemasons venerate above all others. Since I also lived in Milton Keynes for a few years, I was amazed to find out just how much the building of this new city was influenced by Stonehenge. There are a great many other fascinating revelations to be found within the pages of Rosemary Hill’s Stonehenge, such as the fact that many previous commentators on the site mistakenly came to the conclusion that the momument must have been post Roman, simply because the Romans never mentioned it! Or at least, the Romans never mentioned Stonehenge as far as we know, as they may have written about it in an account which was lost, in the same way that the name of Boudicca was lost in the annals of British history until the rediscovery of Roman accounts during the Renaissance. Rosemary Hill also relates how the story of the Wicker Man became entwined with Stonehenge’s history, along with the Druids. The story of how modern man has tried and failed to replicate the transportation of the stones is most amusing! Rosemary Hill’s Stonehenge is a really great exposition of the monument, and very much stands comparison with Mary Beard’s recent account of Pompeii.

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On Roads: A Hidden History by Joe Moran review

Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill