Four key road pioneers

Turnpike Trusts could not have been successful without the work of new road engineers. These were men who pioneered the road building techniques that increased travel around Britain.

The four main men who pioneered British road building were:

1. General George Wade - the first road engineer to build more than 250 miles of roads in Scotland. He believed in putting down a strong foundation to make the roads last longer.
2. John (Blind Jack) Metcalfe - a blind Yorkshireman who built more than 180 miles of Pennine roads. He tapped out his route using a stick and then supervised the building of the roads. He put down a basic foundation of heather and branches with stones on top. This went solid when traffic travelled on it. His roads had a convex camber to help drain water into ditches beside the road, but they were often winding and indirect.
3. John Loudon Macadam - a Scottish road builder who chose to build cheaper and more affordable roads, which made him the most influential road builder of his time. He believed a road needed good drainage and a dry sub-soil that could be covered with smaller stones, then a layer of small fine chippings of about three inches in size and lastly one-inch stones. Macadam was made the surveyor of roads in the Bristol area in 1815 and by 1827, he was appointed the general surveyor of roads in Great Britain.
4. Thomas Telford - he built more than a thousand miles of roads in Shropshire and Scotland. His biggest achievement was the London to Holyhead Road and the Menai Straits Bridge. Telford used nine-inch blocks of stone for the foundation of his road and then put smaller stones on top and covered that with a layer of small stones and gravel. Like Metcalfe, he cambered his roads and used ditches. Telford's problem was that his roads were too expensive.

The Menai Bridge was a major 19th-century transport development and is still used today