Roads
A whizz around roads in and around Chester from before the Romans to the future
A pano shot near The Cross looking down Eastgate Street and Bridge Street
Introduction
It’s the 90s and my first trip to Chester. In an old Saab 900 I am flying over the Weaver Viaduct on the M56. To the left stands Helsby Hill, the rocks of which stood where the Sahara is now. To the right is Stanlow refinery which probably outputted the 98RON petrol powering my journey. Climate dread wasn’t yet a thing.
I park on Hoole Road (essentially the start of the Roman Road from Chester to Warrington) a mile or so out of town. I stroll down Frodsham Street to the striking, walkable centre sitting atop a grid system laid down by the Romans.
According to Kevin Kelly, roads are the third most ubiquitous technology on our planet (agriculture being #1). In this essay we are going to whizz around the roads in and around Chester. We start before the Romans, arrive at the present day, and look to possible futures. We are going to take a few diversions, but hopefully no blind alleys. I’ve included links to further reading. Roads are a big subject!
An interesting recent scientific article shows that the location of Roman roads is a good predictor of both modern road networks and economic activity. Chester continues to thrive partly because of its good Roman road network – which also enabled it to thrive as a medieval market town. But the Romans themselves based their roads on what they found here…so the roads of today (and of tomorrow) have a history stretching back millennia.
Before the Romans
The Romans didn’t invent roads, but they sure knew how to improve existing ones. So what roads were in West Cheshire before the Romans? We don’t know exactly but we can speculate. As far as I know, no ancient trackways have been discovered in Cheshire (unlike for example the Sweet Track in Somerset which is 5,800 years old).
According to MC Bishop much of the prehistoric road system may have come about during the Neolithic period as people had more settled lifestyles and needed to trade with each other.
In Britain, Iron Age hillforts are often found close to Roman roads which suggests that the Roman roads were often built on top of Iron Age tracks. West Cheshire has several Iron Age hillforts: Helsby, Woodhouse, Eddisbury Hill, Kelsborrow, Beeston, and Maiden Castle. And in nearby Shropshire is the major fort at Old Oswestry. Were these forts connected by some form of road network? The British were well known for using chariots in warfare in the first century BC, and I can well imagine the tribes thundering around trackways in West Cheshire before the Romans rocked up.
Enter the Romans
The Roman roads around Chester based on Margary with the principal forts shown with their modern and Roman names.
A favourite scene in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian is the “What have the Romans done for us”. Reg (played by John Cleese) concedes “Well, yes, obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don’t they?” Ubiquitous and taken for granted, the Roman roads impact all our daily lives 2,000 years later.
In Chester so much Roman history surrounds you – the walls, the amphitheatre, the Deva experience, what lies under the shops. But my knowledge of Roman roads around here was sketchy, so I decided to map the basics. Fortunately, there are some brilliant resources available if you want to explore more deeply.
An important road used by the Ancient Britons was Watling Street which runs from the south coast through London and across the middle of England to Wroxeter (near Shrewsbury). When the Romans first conquered these isles in 46AD they fortified Watling Street (and other main tracks) to make it easier for their armies to control the north. Roman roads were primarily a means of exerting military control.
At Wroxeter the Romans built two main roads from Watling Street: one to Chester (established as the Roman fort Deva Victrix in 79AD) and the other to Holyhead (passing close to the Roman fort Segontium in Caernarfon). Cheshire people also use the name Watling Street to refer to the route from Chester to Northwich (the Roman fort Condate) and indeed there is still a Watling Street in Northwich.
A very detailed resource on Roman roads in Cheshire is from the Roman Roads Research Association which has a page dedicated to roads in Cheshire. We are discovering possible new Roman roads all the time. See this link:
https://www.romanroads.org/gazetteer/cheshire/cheshire.html
According to Ivan Margary who wrote the still definitive book on Roman roads in Britain, these Roman roads radiate from Chester:
East - along Eastgate to Northwich and onto Manchester
Northeast - Along Hoole Road to Wilderspool in Warrington
South – Across the Dee near the Old Dee Bridge, down Eaton Road to Malpas, Whitchurch and Wroxeter.
Southwest – Following Lache Lane to Wales, bypassing the marshes around Saltney.
Northwest – Through Mollington to the Wirral, possibly going to the busy trading port of Meols.
These roads follow similar paths to the modern road network. We recently went on holiday to Anglesey along the A55 which follows a very similar route to the Roman road from Chester to the major fort at Segontium, built just before the one at Chester.
The Romans never conquered Ireland but plenty of trading went on between Ireland and the Northwest before, during and after the Roman era. Some people think Holyhead was built to protect the important copper mine at Parys Mountain from Irish marauders. Did the Romans transport copper from Anglesey by road to Chester and beyond? Almost certainly, but the evidence is sketchy.
Parys Mountain on the Isle of Anglesey. Yes it does look like Mars! Romans surely mined copper here.
The Roman roads were mainly built by the army using local materials (rocks from riverbeds, gravel from quarries). Maintaining the roads was a different matter and was managed (as it is today) by local town councils. The difference is that local officials were personally liable for road maintenance (they needed to tax people to raise the required cash).
The Roman Road network was the greatest feat of civil engineering until the railways arrived in the 19thcentury.
After the Romans
When the Romans left Britain, they (obviously!) left their roads behind them. Road systems constantly adapt to human needs: some Roman roads have been used continuously since Roman times (some of the A56 for example) and some have fallen out of use, waiting to be rediscovered.
Historians have found that a lot of battlefields from Anglo-Saxon times onwards have been on or near Roman roads. The armies would have needed roads to move at scale and pace, and Roman roads provided the ready-made answer.
For example, in 1277 when Edward I was building his ‘Ring of Iron’ castles across North Wales, he ordered 30 miles of Roman road to be cleared from Chester to Conwy via Flint and Rhuddlan.
The Roman Road system - maintained and with some changes - remained the core of medieval infrastructure in Britain. But armies weren’t the only people to use roads in the Middle Ages. The church made good use of them for travel and communication, and many major ecclesiastical centres (including Chester) were built in places with a Roman fort.
Compare the fortunes of Wroxeter (once the fourth largest Roman city in Britain) with Chester. The Anglo-Saxons chose to build the town of Shrewsbury (a few miles from Wroxeter) rather than base it on the former Roman city, which had fallen into disrepair. By contrast, Chester had been maintained and developed since the Romans left and so became a thriving medieval city – combining a Roman fort, a Norman castle and an ecclesiastical centre.
Turnpike Trusts
The 1555 Highways Act made parishes responsible for maintaining roads. This system worked well enough for local traffic but when there was a major route passing through the parish (for example between Chester and Wrexham) the resources of the parish could be overwhelmed and the roads got into a poor state. The solution was something called a turnpike trust.
The first turnpike trust was set up to manage part of the London-Chester Road (Watling Street) between Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. The idea of a turnpike trust is that the trustees would manage the resources from several parishes and combine these with tolls from users outside the parish. The trust would erect turnpike gates to charge a toll to those using the roads.
There were several turnpike trusts established in an around Chester: Chester and Frodsham, Chester and Tarvin, Chester and Whitchurch, Chester and Wrexham, and Chester, Neston and Woodside Ferry.
If you want a detailed look at turnpikes around Nantwich have a look at this excellent booklet:
http://turnpikes.org.uk/KL%20Nantwich%20Turnpikes.pdf
The most popular way of getting around Britain during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries was the stagecoach. During this time roads improved and so did the coaches themselves.
The Mail Coach
Until the railways took over, the fastest way to travel in England was with by the mail coach which travelled non-stop except to change horses. Chester was an important mail coach destination being on the major route from London to Holyhead.
The Pied Bull is reputed to be the oldest coaching inn in Chester and outside is a sign (a replica from 1763):
The coaching sign outside the Pied Bull Inn looking down King Street
The mail coach system was instigated by John Palmer, a theatre owner from Bath and later the Mayor and MP. Palmer used stagecoaches to transport people and equipment between theatres, and he found this to be much more efficient than the postal system at the time. He pitched the idea to the (resistant) Post Office and later the Chancellor of the Exchequer William Pitt agreed to an experimental run between Bristol and London.
We’ve already met Thomas De Quincey on this blog: his family lived for a time at the Priory House at St John’s Church in Chester. De Quincey wrote an unusual, long essay called The English Mail Coach in three parts. The first part – on the glory of motion – compares the newfangled way of travelling by rail with the grandeur of by coach. Railways are objectively faster, but you don’t feel the speed in your bones:
The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.
No doubt there will be similar nostalgia for the internal combustion engine as we move to electric vehicles. During the ‘coaching era’ there were several technical advances in how roads were built which increased speed and the jarring jolts of the worst potholes.
If you’d like to read more about long-distance coaching, then this has more:
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/ches/vol5/pt2/pp73-83.
Telford, Macadam and Tarmac
One of the masterpieces of civil engineering is the A5 (London to Holyhead) route built by Thomas Telford which transformed a treacherous three-day journey and the route to Dublin. The A5 was the first major civilian state-funded road building project since Roman times and much of its route is contiguous with Watling Street. Telford’s approach was based on Roman engineering with substantial foundations. A survey in 2000 revealed that about 40% of the A5 survives in much the same way that Telford built it.
A big breakthrough in road building came from the work of John Loudon Macadam whose approach (using compacted layers of crushed stone and without the need for rock foundations) was simpler and more economical than previous approaches. Macadam’s approach was deployed across the globe, and the basic principles are used today.
When the motor car arrived the macadam road surfaces weren’t strong enough and a lot of dust was kicked up. Enter Tarmac, which was discovered by accident.
Edgar Hooley was an inventor from Swansea. He was working near Derby and spotted a particularly smooth stretch of road. He discovered that a barrel of tar had burst onto the road and that waste slag had been used to cover it up. He spent a year working out how to replicate the method and then made Radcliffe Road in Nottingham, the world’s first tarmac road.
Crossville Motor Services
In 1900 there were only around 700 or 800 cars on British roads. The million mark was hit around 1930. So how did people get around by road? Well, a lot of people used the motor bus and Chester was quick to get in on the act.
The first motor bus service that ran from Chester was to Ellesmere Port and was established in 1911 (then as now, there is no direct rail service between Chester and Ellesmere Port). It was provided by Crosville Motor Services which started in Chester and had its headquarters there (initially at the rear of Crane Bank). By 1927 Crosville ran 48 bus routes from Chester and had a near-monopoly of the local market. By 1935 it was one of the biggest bus companies in the UK running 1000 buses running across north and mid-Wales, Chesire and South-West Lancashire.
If you want to find out more there is a dedicated site:
The Motorways
Britain was relatively slow to get into motorways. The first motorway in the world was built between Milan and the small Italian Italian city of Varese. In 1948 the Special Roads Bill proposed 1,000 miles of “motorway” in Britain. But it took another 10 years to 1958 for an eight-mile stretch of the M6 near Preston to be built.
Chester is the endpoint of two motorways: the M53 and the M56. The M53 is the mid-Wirral motorway that links Birkenhead to Chester and was opened in 1972. The M56 connects Manchester to Chester and was opened in stages from 1971 to 1981. The engineering highlight is the ¾ mile Weaver Viaduct. The Chester services were a picnic area until 1998.
Here is a very informative video on the M53:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3jQUW1B5dQ
The modern A55 starts where the M53 ends and connects Chester with Holyhead. As the A55 circles around Chester it connects with several A roads: the A51, the A41, the A483 and the A550. The A55 takes you all the way to Holyhead – dual carriageway all the way except for when you cross the Menai Strait. It is one of the most spectacular motorway routes in the UK and the road is the result of tireless engineering work over the last 100 years.
The Inner Ring Road
Chester’s inner ring road is the main way that vehicles circulate around the now (mainly pedestrianised) city centre. It was built in the 1960s – a time when motorways and main roads mushroomed in Britain to accommodate the boom in private motoring.
Lots of properties in Nicholas Street and Watergate Street were destroyed to make way for road traffic. Most controversially a new opening (St Martin’s Gate) was made by cutting through the city walls. For a lot more detail, have a look at this informative site:
https://chesterwalls.info/martins.html
The Inner Ring Road was opened by Barbara Castle - one of our most formidable politicians - when she was Secretary of State for Transport. In this role, she introduced three critical aspects of road safety: the breathalyser, the national speed limit, and compulsory seat belts in all new cars.
As you walk around the perimeter of this fine city you are likely to think “wow, that is a lot of cars…”. Will Chester see a reduction in traffic in the coming decades? Will there be smarter and greener ways of getting around?
Cheshire West and Chester’s Local Transport Plan
The local council has recently been engaging around its new Local Transport Plan (LTP4) and it is worth pointing out a few facts about things as they are now:
Most travel is by private motor vehicle, with most cars only carrying one person
Bus travel is declining faster than the national average and many residents don’t have access to a frequent bus service
The council spend £7m a year repairing streets, but the maintenance backlog is estimated at £290m!
The headline targets (which are in draft form) focus on reducing carbon emissions through both modal shift (more people walking, wheeling, cycling and using transport) and by shifting to electric vehicles. There is a big focus on reducing the number of people being socially excluded because of lack of transport.
The transport plan does not envisage any major new roads, although the borough will need a lot of new homes over the coming decades.
The Chester Archaeological Society have commented on LTP4, and this is worth reading:
They say that to significant degree the problems the council is trying to solve stem from planning trends and policies reaching back to World War II. The private motor vehicle has given so many of us flexibility but at a huge cost. How do we heal the damage rather than storing up even bigger problems for the future?
The future of roads
Roads will be with us for as long as our species lasts. The roads system made solid by the Romans form the blueprint for our roads today and those of the future. Roads are vital to our economy, for leisure and for social connections.
We need to reduce our reliance on private motor vehicles and use renewable energy to power how we get around. There are around 34 million registered cars in the UK, which is equivalent to 490 cars for every 1,000 people or 1.2 cars per household.
Changing how we use our roads will require a huge amount of behavioural change, investment, long-term decision-making as well as new technology. To what extent are we willing to trade some of the individual freedom and comfort offered by our cars for different ways of getting around?
As well as the increasing use of electric vehicles, McKinsey have identified four trends that are likely to shape the future of road transport:
A big one is the rise of autonomous vehicles. The second half of this decade will see the rise of the robotaxi – Uber and Momenta are starting trials in Germany in 2026. I predict Chester will start to see robotaxis by 2032.
A second trend is the rise of micromobility which includes bicycles, e-bikes and e-scooters. Ginger operated 180 e-scooters in the city between 2020 and 2024 but decided to withdraw from Chester. Hopefully we will see more dedicated cycle lanes around the city.
A third trend is in intermodal applications. Imagine an app that offered you the best way of getting to (say) Manchester from your home without having to buy multiple tickets.
The fourth trend is shared mobility for example getting a shared EV taxi from out of town into the centre.
Another potential trend not covered by McKinsey is changes to roads themselves - for example whether we will be able to generate solar power from our roads.
Conclusion
For thousands of years roads have formed the slowly evolving skeleton that join our communities, driving economic growth and cultural development. Chester, the wider Northwest and Wales are particularly rich in transport history with much more to discover. From Roman armies on the march to robotaxis we have skimmed the surface of a big topic. If you have made it this far, thank you for reading!
Notes and Sources
This is the article that shows the relationship between Roman roads and current economic prosperity:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0147596722000269?via%3Dihub
M.C. Bishop – The Secrets of the Roman Roads in Britain is worth a read.
John Higgs wrote an excellent book about Watling Street (but sadly Chester doesn’t feature in it).
This article provides a good overview of roads and road transport in Chester:
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/ches/vol5/pt2/pp73-83
The excellent site on Chester Walls has a fascinating page on St Martin’s Gate
https://chesterwalls.info/martins.html
The Cheshire West and Chester Local Transport Plan 4 details can be found here:
https://participatenow.cheshirewestandchester.gov.uk/local-transport-plan-4-core-strategy
The McKinsey summary article on the future of mobility is here: