Saturday marks the 65th anniversary since the UK’s first cross-country motorway, the M1, opened to the public. The ambitious project, which aimed to link London to Leeds, was decades in the making, with the first plans for a motorway network in the UK dating back more than a century. Aspirations for a London to Birmingham route go as far back as 1923, but it wasn’t until the Special Roads Act 1949 was passed that the first motorways were planned in the 1950s.
The first to open was Lancashire’s Preston Bypass, which is now part of the M6. However, the M1 became the first to link up far-flung towns and cities the following year. The first stretch opened between Watford and Rugby, and this section took 19 months to construct, including work through one of the wettest summers on record in 1958.
Over four phases, the final 193 miles of the M1 were laid out from London to Leeds, with the final part opening in 1999. The early M1 had no speed limit, crash barriers, or lights, and had soft verges instead of hard shoulders. In addition, it had a 24-hour restaurant at Watford Gap Services that attracted the likes of the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, as London’s pubs shut at 23:00 on the dot.
According to the AA, 20,000 drivers used the M1 each day in the first year, compared to between 130,000 and 140,000 a day today. A survey of more than 7,000 drivers who have used the M1 found 60% found congestion on the motorway poor, 47% thought the road was badly littered, and 37% thought the service station provision was poor.
The M1 has been the backbone of British motoring for 65 years, said Edmund King, the AA president. Despite the issues, people forget or don’t realise what it was like before major motorways were constructed. The M1 transformed mobility in the UK, he added. It enabled families to visit relatives in far-flung parts of the country, which would have taken many more hours to get to and led to the expansion of motorway network we recognise today
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