Did the Victorians have better roads than us? A history of Britain’s potholed streets

Potholes are the motorist’s ultimate bug bear, responsible for an estimated £474 million worth of damage in the UK last year. As insurance companies wade through a further 30% average increase in compensation claims, have the tarmac cracks in our hole-riddled roads become a symbol for all that is wrong with our infrastructure?

Although the finger is pointed repeatedly at local councils for deteriorating roads, their condition is not solely a result of neglect. Heavy rain and wildly fluctuating temperatures place untold strain on any pre-existing cracks and crevices.

Finally the matter has come to a head as political parties learn that, for some, it’s not taxes, but potholes that need addressing. Rishi Sunak for example, has realised late in the day, that it is not more low emissions zones that are needed, but pothole repair. Will the £8.3 billion the Conservative manifesto has pledged for this purpose woo the hearts, wheels and votes of the road-loving population?

Either way, it is not a problem that is going to go away. Along with climate, the nature of road usage has fundamentally changed. Online orders and home deliveries are now the preferred shopping choice of many, and the volume and weight of freight-laden vehicles accelerates the wear and tear. As our roads become a patchwork of filled-in holes, it might be worth remembering how we got the roads we now have.

For many of us, cobblestones are synonymous with history. Still a frequent sight in the older quarters of towns and cities, their durability demonstrates exactly how revolutionary Thomas Telford’s road-laying techniques were.

Nicknamed “The Colossus of Roads”, Telford’s specifications were labour-intensive and expensive, but cobblestones were one of the few surfaces able to withstand the relentless pounding of horses’ hooves and iron wheels of Victorian traffic. So why were so many later overlaid or replaced entirely? The answer is largely noise.

By the 1840s newspapers such as The Times were routinely inundated with rants and proposed remedies to the ever-increasing clatter of the streets. The writer Charles Dickens went as far as to claim that his close friend and illustrator John Leech was driven to his early death in 1864 by the daily bombardment outside his study.

Admittedly this was not traffic noise alone, but the incessant cacophony of street buskers, hawkers, dogs, cracked whips, bells and the regular herding of livestock to market. As so many cowered from the din, W.H. Delano, general manager of the Compagnie Générale des Asphaltes de France (General Asphalt Company of France), referred to a new condition to explain Leech’s magnified anxiety – “agoraphobia”.

Despite this, the Victorians were masters of compromise and adaptation. And when it came to urban life, 19th-century city dwellers were adept at balancing the impracticalities of their lifestyles with the condition of their streets.

Wealthier ladies carried their evening shoes in bags, pinned up their trains, tacked detachable “dust strips” or ruffles to their dress fronts like mud guards and even wore precarious wood or iron pattens – effectively strap on stilts – to elevate their skirts above the dirt. As the writer Jane Austen implies in her regency novels: a clean hem, however it was achieved, was a sign of class.

Fashion and noise aside, there were any number of reasons why cobbling all of London’s streets was too great a feat. The expense of the requisite 600,000 tonnes of granite, plus the skill demanded for its shaping and laying was an art form too slow for a city that increased in population daily. Also, they were slippery in the perpetual slurry, trip hazards in the smog, while horses caught their hooves on any unrounded edges. In short, it was time for 19th-century authorities to think outside the box.

The most effective solution may sound like an unlikely one: wooden roads. In 1839, pine blocks were trialled in that most frequented of London thoroughfares outside the Old Bailey court. These appeared to tick all the boxes, being quieter, smoother, gentler on horse hooves and less perilous in muddy conditions. But, as with macadam (an 1820’s recipe that bound compacted stones with asphalt), they wore out quickly.

More unexpected problems soon arose. In Piccadilly, the experiment with pine was abandoned after a matter of weeks as horse urine (averaging a gallon a day for each of London’s 300,000 horses) soaked the porous wood and in the baking heat emitted potent ammonia fumes.

Local shopkeepers complained of lost trade and discoloured shop frontages – would you buy your bread from a yellowing bakery that smelt of wee? – and health concerns. W.H. Delano, an ardent proponent of the asphalt used in Paris, declared the “unhygienic” paving was “stunting growth of children and debilitating adults” with its unhealthy vapours. He added that, after one or two years, they came to resemble “worn-out tooth brushes” and even became a fire risk.

Urban planners weren’t about to give up that easily though.

The years to come saw experiments with different types and cuts of wood, with creosote treatments, concrete-fillers, cork and rubber coatings. While the latter of these was a slip-prone failure, it sparked a new idea entirely – why rubber coat the road, when you could just as easily coat a vehicle’s wheels? Enter the tyre.

Meanwhile, in the forests of Australia, Richard Watkins Richards, the mayor of Sydney in the 1890s, had come upon the optimum material. Nine times denser than its English alternatives, the tropical hardwood “Jarrah” (eucalyptus marginata) was durable and urine-resistant but, being on the other side of the world, also expensive and labour intensive.

Inevitably, the roads of the wealthy were the priority for such woods, while others simply had to endure what, in 1894, Major Lewis Isaac declared a “most sickening odour”. Even so, Bartholomew’s map of London shows that by 1928, London had over 53 miles of wooden roads.

The last unassuming remnants can be found in some of London’s streets but by the 1950s, “repavement” had progressively replaced the tired wood with the wonder substance of tarmac or asphalt. In fact the salvaging, repurposing and door-to-door sale of decommissioned blocks was reportedly the first rung on Lord Alan Sugar’s entrepreneurial career ladder.

The ad hoc antidote to potholes that give our roads their characteristic patchwork demonstrate the challenges of urban travel – a battle with the elements for which local authorities must balance risk, cost and priority in the face of constant change. The Victorians’ enterprises demonstrate how their dogged inventiveness was a means of adapting and evolving even as their city was shifting beneath their feet.

Lauren Colley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.