Roads of East Shropshire Through Time

When Daniel Defoe, the author of A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, visited Shropshire in the early 1720s, on his journey from Shrewsbury to Lichfield he travelled along what he called 'The Great Ancient Road'. It was the Watling Street of the Romans, the county's first turnpike road, part of Thomas Telford's Holyhead Road, and the A5 of the motor age. Along it, at these different times, Roman troops marched, medieval pilgrims and royalist armies trudged, horse-drawn stage and mail coaches sped, and motor vehicles ran. The growth of motor traffic in the first half of the twentieth century led to improvements for all the area's roads; but the biggest changes came in the second half of the century with the development of Telford New Town and the opening of the M54 motorway. Today's road map of the area is very different from that of fifty years ago. The book aims to survey pictorially these developments in roads and their traffic in East Shropshire from earliest times to the present day.