Clarkson's philistines would appal these pootling pioneers

The very vehicle that green groups decry today was behind the wave of interest that resulted in their foundation

Tristram Hunt
The Guardian, Monday 16 February 2009

The deal for Britain's ailing auto-industry is clear: to get the £2bn in soft loans Peter Mandelson is offering, it needs to drop the gas-guzzlers. Or, in the business secretary's bureaucratese, "further UK objectives on low carbon and green technology". Such conditions will come as a shock to a motoring mafia profoundly wedded to environmental destruction. For decades, their stock in trade has been more emissions, outdated technology, cheaper fuel and bigger roads. It is a culture of philistinism and greed endorsed by the irksomely compelling Top Gear - where presenters try out trucks by smashing them into chestnut trees, drive 4x4s over sensitive heather and peat lands, and take a delight in damaging wilderness.
But Mandelson should know there is another story of the motor car in Britain beyond Jeremy Clarkson's crazy gang. It is a history of respect for the natural environment and national heritage far more in tune with Mandelson's green agenda. And one that shaped the modern idea of England itself.
To begin with, motoring was the sport of princes. King Edward, Rudyard Kipling and Alfred Harmsworth were the great auto-enthusiasts of the 1900s, tearing along the London-Brighton run and accelerating merrily past the 20mph speed limit. As a result, UK car manufacturers - the Wolseleys and Rolls-Royces - consciously avoided the mass market models developed by Ford and Peugeot.
Only Morris Motors and the Austin Seven bucked the trend and, with prices finally falling, the interwar years saw car ownership sweep the middle classes. The 100,000 drivers of 1919 rose to 2 million by 1939, bringing with them a more sophisticated appreciation of the wonder of travel. If the railways had opened up the coastal resorts of the 19th century to the working classes, then the combustion engine delivered the interior of England to the motoring classes. Out they pootled to the peaks and the lakes, the moors, downs and Highlands. The pull of nature had rarely been more popular than in the interwar years as the National Trust, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and the national parks movement all enjoyed a surge in membership on the back of the motor car. The very vehicle that green groups so decry today was, in large part, responsible for their foundation.
Accompanying the middle-class motorist came a burgeoning guidebook literature. John Betjeman authored the lovingly designed Shell Guides, and JB Priestley chronicled his English Journey, but the market leader was In Search of England, by the former foreign correspondent HV Morton. "Never before have so many people been searching for England," he wrote in the aftermath of his success. "The popularity of the cheap motor car is greatly responsible for this long-overdue interest in English history, antiquities and topography. More people than in any previous generation are seeing the real country for the first time."
Morton offered his readers a romantic gaze of deep England: Stonehenge and Beaulieu Abbey, churches and village greens, the Cotswolds and the Thames valley. It was an unchanging, deeply conservative vision of Britain that proved enormously popular as motoring parties sought a sense of belonging in the ancient ruins and stately homes, crumbling abbeys and picturesque pubs of southern England. History and heritage was brought to new audiences by the most modernist of machines. And when Britain came to imagine what it was fighting for during the second world war, it was Morton's dreamy vision of England that dominated propaganda.
But, from the beginning, this dreamscape was riven with contradiction. Those parts of Britain that had made motoring possible - the industrial heartlands of the Black Country and the north - were always excluded. When Priestley went to Coventry to investigate the production of his Daimler, he did not like what he saw. "The picturesque remains of the old Coventry are besieged by an army of nuts, bolts, hammers, spanners, gauges, drills and machine lathes." And he found Birmingham positively beastly. "It was so many miles of ugliness, squalor, and the wrong kind of vulgarity, the decayed anaemic side ..."
To cater for the new army of motorists, a sprawling infrastructure of petrol stations, motels and car parks crept across Britain. So did a new landscape of unauthorised plotlands. As the working classes gained access to the motor car, they celebrated their mobility by buying up plots of land in beauty spots and coastal resorts across the south coast. In Kent and Essex, a rude mid-century architecture of prefabs, railway huts and rough conversions confronted Morton.
But in the postwar years, this individualism was lost to a technocratic centralism as the state surrendered to the car. Ministers connived with manufacturers to bulldoze the countryside, eviscerate city centres, and subsidise pollution. The historicism, aestheticism and idiosyncrasy of motoring were abandoned. But the combination of climate change and a collapsing car industry might offer a way out in the form of post-carbon manufacturing. Is it then too much to hope that Britain's broader car culture might also drop the need for speed and speak to a more enlightened narrative of motoring? Anyone for slow driving?
• Tristram Hunt's film The Joy of Motoring is on BBC4 on Wednesday at 9pm tristramhunt@btinternet.com