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Reviews
| Thomas Telford's Holyhead Road: The A5 in North Wales (CBA Research Report 135). By Jamie Quartermaine, Barrie Trinder, and Rick Turner. York, England: Council for British Archaeology, 2003. xx+182 pp., illus., maps, tables, diags., bibl., appendices, table of contents. $35 pb (ISBN 1-90277134-6) [available in U.S. from David Brown Book Co., Oakville, Conn.].
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Thomas Telford's Holyhead Road is a model study that combines the best elements of a historic structures report with the best elements of a historic resource study. It interprets the cultural importance of a British civil engineering landmark through evidence gathered from the technical disciplines of archaeology and engineering. Divided into nine chapters, each one focuses on a different aspect of the Holyhead Road.
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This thorough examination of the Holyhead Road begins with a concise but scholarly investigation of the context from which the Holyhead Road arose, one aspect of which was the Crown's need to establish faster and more reliable communications between London and Ireland: the development of the private turnpike, roads, and the increasing numbers of mail passenger coaches that used them. Once the problem was defined, the unique background and technical skills of Thomas Telford were applied to solve it.
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Telford was among the most versatile of Britain's early civil engineers. He was able to apply the hard-won skills he had acquired through his earlier triumphs as an architect, canal engineer, bridge designer, and road builder to the unique problems that would be associated with the design and building of the Holyhead Road—a rare example of an engineer being given a virtually free hand. As a result, the road is replete with innovative features, some of which have been recognized as international civil engineering landmarks. The best known are the great chain suspension bridges at Conway and across the Menai Straits between Anglessey and the mainland of Wales.
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The three authors, Jamie Quartermaine, Barrie Trinder, and Rick Turner, have recognized the organic totality of Telford's achievement and investigated aspects of the Holyhead Road that have been ignored by almost all previous scholars who have studied this transportation artery. Among these features are the maintenance supply depots; the great embankment that raised the Holyhead Road far above the surrounding lands in order to lessen the abruptness of its elevation changes; the great breakwaters, docks, and monuments of Holyhead harbor; and even the coaching inns with their attached stables.
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Equally important, the authors have analyzed the roles that the Holyhead Road played in local, regional, and national economic and communications networks. The great irony of the Holyhead Road is that, despite its many costly engineering achievements, its primacy lasted for little more than two decades, peaking in the 1820s and early 1830s. Despite many innovations and the high level of workmanship, the Holyhead road was built for coach and wagon traffic, but by the late 1830s a new and swifter means of transportation had begun to eclipse Telford's masterpiece—the railroad. As Turner and Trinder point out, early expectations that the Holyhead Road would be a financial success (it was planned that the tolls collected would eventually pay back the huge costs of the road's construction) would never become a reality due to competition from railroads.
The Parliamentary Commission would recover much of the expenditure of building the road from the tolls gathered from the fourteen toll houses erected along its length in Wales. For a time in the late 1820s and early 1830s, these toll houses were to generate a healthy income. This success was to be short-lived, however, as Telford's great achievement was to be superseded by technological change—the coming of the railways.
The opening of the Grand Junction Railway in 1837 from Newton-Le-Willows to Birmingham quickly affected traffic on the road. From September of that year, the Dublin mails were conveyed from London to Birmingham by road, thence by railway from Hartford to Cheshire, before being taken through Chester and along the North Wales Coast to Holyhead. From 1839 they were dispatched by sea from Liverpool, a city whose railroad connections obviated any need for road transport. In 1844 the Chester and Holyhead Railroad was incorporated with Robert Stephenson as engineer-in-chief. It followed a route that was surveyed as early as 1838 by Stephenson's father George. In 1850 the direct rail route to Holyhead was finally completed with the opening of Stephenson's Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits (p. 114).
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As a result of the opening of a direct rail connection between London and Holyhead, Telford's great road never repaid its costs, and it rapidly declined during the 1850s, becoming only a route for local traffic and trade in North Wales. Ironically, Telford's Holyhead Road would enjoy a rebirth in importance in the early-20th century with the advent and growth of automobile traffic. Designated as a major trunk road across North Wales, the Holyhead Road was used by ever-increasing numbers of cars as the 20th century moved on. Ironically, this increased traffic began to pose threats to the integrity of the engineering features that had been such a hallmark of Telford's achievement. Increased auto traffic had many deleterious effects on the major structures of the road. The most drastic was the need for the almost total rebuilding and replacement of the suspension system of Telford's great Menai Straits Bridge.
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The implementation of the high-speed motorways system in Great Britain during the 1970s and 1980s ultimately brought salvation to the Holyhead Road. The construction of motorways across North Wales resulted in the loss of the Holyhead Road's status as a major trunk route. The result was an immediate decline in the flow of traffic on the Holyhead, which helped to make possible its preservation and interpretation as a historic resource. Many previously overlooked aspects of Telford's engineering genius and aesthetic sensibilities were rediscovered, such as the simple but finely crafted sunburst wrought-iron tollgates. By 2000 Telford's Holyhead Road was firmly established as a resource to be enjoyed by hikers, bikers, and leisurely drivers.
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This reviewer cannot close his evaluation of Thomas Telford's Holyhead Road without mentioning the superb organization and smooth language flow that characterizes this volume. Particularly helpful are the extensive bibliography and useful tables that are placed as appendices at the end of the book. Finally, the authors have included a guide and gazetteer to the Holyhead Road based on its extant stone and cast-iron milestones.
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| Thomas Telford's Holyhead Road is a superb treatment of a truly outstanding surviving civil engineering landmark from the era of the British industrial revolution. |
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