Driving North/Driving South reprised: Britain’s changing roadscapes, 2000–2020

Abstract This article explores how Britain’s changing roadscapes are apprehended by the road-user with reference to my own experience of driving the same route between Scotland and Cornwall over the past quarter-century. My pre-millennial analysis of these journeys (published 2000) is compared with more recent driving-events and deploys the same multi-layered autoethnographic methods I first experimented with then. My central argument is concerned with the ways in which drivers and passengers both respond and contribute to such change vis-a-vis those aspects of their own autobiographies which are entwined with the ‘lifecourse of the road’ (Mikhail Bakhtin). The concept I have devised to account for the ways in which the materiality of the road is entangled with the cognitive and affective passage of the traveller is journeying: i.e. the means by which the individual journey is overlaid, and shaped, not only by previous journeys but also the life-journey of the traveller for whom a familiar route has special meaning. The analysis reveals the extent to which increased traffic and congestion has impacted upon the experience of driving long-distance routes as well as the critical role roadside landmarks (and their disappearance) play in orienting and disorienting the traveller.


Introduction
This article reprises a book chapter first published in 2000 (Pearce 2000) which, by detailing my frequent journeys between Lancaster, Cornwall and Scotland, produced a millennial snapshot of Britain's road network.Twenty years on, I explore how changing roadscapes, and changing driving conditions, have impacted upon the experience of driving the route with reference to my own autobiographical accounts of more recent journeys.Although this means that my analysis is necessarily partial, my long-standing research on automobility and driving across wide-ranging literary and other texts has confirmed that many of the perceptual and affective mechanisms I describe are common to other road-users (e.g.surprise, nostalgia, disorientation).Texts such as Chris Cooper's 'now and then' study of the Great North Road (Cooper 2013) and Edward Platt's Leadville (Platt 2000; a portrait of Western Avenue in London)as well as the extensive archive of articles written by road enthusiasts on the website of SABRE (Society of All British Road Enthusiasts) (https//:www.sabre.roadsorg.uk)provideimportant context in this respect.Changes to road environments are felt powerfully by road-users of all kinds (i.e.those who live or work on a road as well as those for whom transport infrastructures enable 'dwelling-in-motion' (Urry 2007;Stratford 2015, 95-101), partly on account of the mirror they hold up to the lifecourse of the traveller (in particular, their own transience and mortality).Sensations of shock and loss are, indeed, a recurrent feature of this literature.As Cooper observes in the introduction to his book: 'It was sometimes a surprising journey, and at times for me rather sad, as parts of the road I knew as a child are now just a memory and even stretches I knew as an adult lorry driver have now gone.And so utterly gone too!I think the biggest surprise was how something could be so thoroughly changed that not a trace remains' (Cooper 2013, 7).It is precisely this order of cognitive and emotional response to the changing roadscape that I am interested in here.
By way of introduction it should also be noted that my focus here is very much on the road as a 'driving space' (Merriman 2004(Merriman , 2007) ) in contrast to other recent studies that have been more interested in the road as a dwelling place and/or an expression of the socio-political order.This includes two of the most important books on roads from the past decade: Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox's anthropological study of two major road-building schemes in Peru (Harvey and Knox 2015) and Dimitris Dalakoglou's ethnography of the Albanian-Greek cross-border highway (Dalakoglou 2017).In contrast, my own investigations are more in line with the detailed attention to road infrastructures pioneered by contemporary archaeologists such as Seffryn Penrose (Penrose 2007) and the architectural historians, Kathryn Morrison and John Minnis (Morrison and Minnis 2012), as well as Tim Edensor's landmark article on driving from 2003: 'M6-Junction 19-16'.The latter remains one of the few publications to combine an interest in the landscape, fabric and furniture of a particular road with reflection on its how its changing features, and the experience of driving it, maps onto the road-user's life (Edensor 2003).Like Edensor, my reflections are limited to British roads and roadscapes which share very different cultural-historical, aesthetic and kinaesthetic traditions to North American or European roads (see Mauch and Zeller 2008;Merriman 2013).While research on the latter continues to give rise to important new historical/cultural research which does, indeed, focus on the road as a driving space (e.g.Bradley 2017; Moraglio 2017), it references a qualitatively different order of driver experience to that which has long been associated with British motoring.At the risk of generalisation, we may posit that, in Britain, both critical and creative studies of the road continue to pay more attention to the microcosmic, mundane and quirky features of motoring (typically entangled with the repetitive, routine and prosaic experiences of everyday life).Such driving practices constitute a very different cognitive and affective sensorium to those typically written about in association with North American or German roads: instead of thrill and liberation there is curiosity; and instead of future-oriented fantasies of a different life, there is nostalgia and sentiment.This, in turn, facilitates a different order of narrative for road-users whose autobiographies are bound up with the roads upon which they travel (e.g.Tom Fort's A303: Highway to the Sun [Fort 2012]).
A further striking point of context here is that cultural/historical interest in roadsboth academic and popularhas declined markedly over the past decade.Although there are some notable exceptions to this as noted above, Joe Moran's observation in 2009 that 'the public image of roads is now so poor' that it is easier to simply disregard them has proven prescient (Moran 2009, 242).As well as road-building having become a 'dirty word' (Moran 2009, 242;Merriman 2014, 201) since the 1990s, the pressing need to radically overhaul automobility as a system (Urry 2007; Dennis and Urry 2009) in light of the climate emergency means that mobilities scholars have responded with systemic (and often technological) solutions (inter alia Manderscheid 2014; Jones and McCreary 2022).This, however, risks minimising the radical human adaptations that such transformations will entail (Adey et al. 2022).A notable exception to this potential blindspot is the extensive body of work that now exists on urban mobility, design and planning, much of which attends to the embodied use city streets including transportation.This literature is too extensive to review here but see Morrison and Minnis (2012, 372-379) and Ole B. Jensen (Jensen and Lang 2016) for indicative overviews.

Route planner
The methodology I have adopted for presenting my autobiographical reflections on these changing roadscapes has evolved over time. 1 In particular, the decision to 'carve up' the various interludes of my journeys between Lancaster, Scotland and Cornwall according to the temporal zones produced through the process of recursive 'journeying' (definition following) rather than geographical locations has been a major step forward in clarifying one of my key research findings: namely, that the way we experience travelling familiar routes is determined less by road features per se than by how those features figure relative to the re-iterative phases of the journey such as 'setting out' or 'nearing home'.What is evident in the diary extracts I go on to discuss here (which have been selected specifically for this purpose), is that each of these zones has acquired meaning over time by dint of the fact that the practice is repeated (c.f., David Bissell's work on 'habit' andcommuting [Bissell 2014, 2018]).Looking back over my documents, it is clear that my journeys have been structured and constrained by the schema of thoughts and feelings that have become associated with specific phases of the journey.What the texts reveal is not only that I see, and look out for, the same roadscape features time and time again, but also that I am likely to experience a reproducible gamut of thought-patterns and emotions when I encounter them.And this, in turn, informs the disorientation that myself and others experience in the face of change.
Although I am by no means the first to dwell upon the infinitely suggestive ways in which the journey collapses the existential with the symbolic and narratological (see Jager [1975] cited above and more recently Adey et al. 2022, 39-40), my definition here is distinctive in that it explores the way in which the individual journey is overlaid, and shaped, not only by previous journeys along familiar roads but also the life-journey of the traveller for whom the route has acquired special meaning.As noted above, it is a concept that has particular significance for the sort of long-distance journeys I discuss here, but can clearly be applied to shorter journeysincluding commutes.Indeed, there are resonances with the way in which Bissell departed from post-Actor-Network-Theory models of travel in his early articles on commuting (e.g.Bissell 2007Bissell , 2009) ) inasmuch as the subjectivity of the traveller is allowed back into the frame.For both Bissell (2007, 291) and myself (Pearce 2016, 156-166), it is important to acknowledge thatnotwithstanding the non-human agencies involvedjourneying promotes periods of reverie and reflection in the travelling-subject that can be life-enhancing and grounding.
This recognition of the role of the traveller in journey-making also chimes with Mikhail Bakhtin's description of the road itself as a time-space that, by implication, is inseparable from the cumulative life-histories of those who travel upon it.He writes: 'Time, as it were, fuses together with space and flows in it (forming the road); this is the source of rich metaphorical expansion of the image of the road as a course: the course of life' (Bakhtin [1981(Bakhtin [ ] 2020, 244), 244).This acknowledgement of the way in which the 'biography' of the road is, metaphorically, entwined with those who travel upon it to become a co-constitutive 'lifecourse' 2 is profound and a reminder of how 'extended' and motile space (Edensor 2010(Edensor , 2014) is qualitatively different from other bounded landscapes.In other words, a road is actualised as a road only when someone travels upon it.With respect to my own analysis, it is also interesting to observe that while, for Bakhtin, the dynamic and interchangeable nature of the temporal and the spatial within the chronotope is its defining feature, it is time, rather than space, that is figured as the proactive agent (Bakhtin [1981(Bakhtin [ ] 2020, 84), 84).Similarly, in the case of the 'driving-events' (Pearce 2017) 3 investigated below, it is the habits, routines and memories associated with familiar routes and mobility practices that causes them to 'take on flesh' and assume, as it were, a third dimension.
For the purposes of analysis, my extracts have been selected to illustrate the particular chronotopic segments, or zones, associated with the spaces and places of the roadscape in question (i.e.'departure', 'intermission' and 'arrival'), with the 'thickness' (Bakhtin [1981] 2020, 84) of the temporal-spatial fusion being one of the features of the experience that I am most interested in.Meanwhile, the categories of change I have sought to capture are multiple and various, and appertain both to the material features of the highway (comprising both the built and natural environment) and the experience of driving itself during a period which has seen approximately 10 million more vehicles take to British roads. 4It should also be noted that my focus throughout is on the long-distance journey, rather than shorter journeys or commutesand, of course, the British motorway is the driving space which has seen the greatest increase in road traffic during the past two decades (see note 4)).Attention to the way in which the experience of driving has been degraded during this period will, I hope, speak to wider post-millennial debates in mobilities studies on road congestion and the arrhythmia of travel (Edensor 2014) and lend a humancentred perspective to a crisis that is more often written about in terms terms of eye-watering statistics (see https://www.gov.uk/collections/congestion-and-reliability) or the new technologies and infrastructures which promise to deliver us from it (e.g.autonomous vehicles, smart motorways) (Dennis and Urry 2009, 131-164).
However, while mobilities scholars and transport historians present themselves as one audience for this research, the theoretical concepts and concerns which inform itand to which it speaksare clearly not limited to roads or road research.Indeed, the theoretical debates with which the discussion most obviously articulates are those that have been topical in cultural geography for a number of years: namely, mobility and time-space (e.g.Virilio [1984Virilio [ ] 2008;;Thrift 2008;Merriman 2012;Edensor 2010Edensor , 2014)); place memory (inter alia Merleau Ponty [1962] 2002;Casey [1987Casey [ ] 2000;;Hoelscher and Alderman 2004;Trigg 2012;Jones and Garde Hansen 2012;Wylie 2017); place attachment (e.g.Relph 1976;Seamon [1979Seamon [ ] 2016Seamon [ , 2018;;Ingold [2007] 2016; Scannell and Gifford 2010;Lewicka 2011;Smith 2018); and kinaesthetics (Banham [1971(Banham [ ] 1973;;Merriman 2006Merriman , 2013;;Robertson 2012;Borden 2012;Merriman and Pearce 2018).Indeed, the further twist in the findings presented here is that roads seriously complicate long-standing definitions of place.Conceptualised as a temporal-spatial corridor in the manner of Bakhtin (see above; also Merriman 2011), the road eludes all those definitions of place (e.g.Cresswell 2004;Agnew 1987) which depend upon human subjects being able to confer meaning onto a location through an embodied engagement with it over time (Smith 2018, 2;Casey 2000).And yet, much of the analysis that follows here figures the driver's relationship to the roadscapes through which they pass in terms of the schema and affects that we associate with place rather than spacea paradox that I return to in the analysis section of the paper.
The discussion that follows, then, is led by a simple research question underpinned by a more complex hypothesis that should be of interest to both geographers and mobilities scholars.While the questionhow has the British roadscape, and the experience of driving it, changed over the past quarter-century?assumesa road-user who is merely an effect of such change, my further interest here is in the somatic, cognitive and affective mechanisms by which roadusers both respond to, and produce, such change through the way in which their autobiographies are entwined with that of the road.

Autoethnography: driving North/driving South 2000-2020
Across the analysis which follows, my millennial chapter -'Driving North/Driving South' (Pearce 2000) figures as the historical point of reference with which all my subsequent travels have been compared.Further documentary accounts of my journeys north and south over the past quarter-century (referred to here as 'road diaries' [R/D]) amount to some 50,000 words of text and date from 2004,2015,2017,2019,2020.Some of the materials record my journeys between Scotland and Lancaster, some between Lancaster and Cornwall, others between my home in the North-West Highlands and Glasgow only (see Figure 1 for a depiction of the route between Scotland and Cornwall).
The hiatus between 2004 and 2015 coincides with the death of my parents (2003)(2004)(2005) and marks the moment when my regular journeys to Cornwall (typically 3-4 per year rising to once a month latterly) stopped abruptly.2015 saw my first attempt to reprise the journey (Pearce 2016), while my most recent record (2019) was written as a conscious attempt to mark the twentieth anniversary of the millennial chapter.Here it should be noted that most of these texts are, on the contrary, occasional and spontaneous.I have not attempted to record every journey I make as part of a dedicated scientific survey and my method of recording them is in the form of a retrospective diaryi.e. a selective reflection on the experience written-up later the same day or a day or two later.This is in significant contrast to the methods employed elsewhere by mobilities scholars (e.g.Cox 2017;Henriksson and Berg 2020;Popan 2020;Wilson 2020) where there is the implicit assumption that the best way to capture a mobility event is to record the experience as soon as possible (typically by way of an audio device).However, inasmuch as my own work has employed autoethnographic methods precisely because they are uniquely placed to reveal the mediating properties of memory and reverie (Pearce 2016, 162-197), the experiential 'sedimentation' of the event arising from the short delay in committing the account to paper does not constitute a problem.Rather, it locates my texts in a long tradition of literary travel writing: for example, Dorothy Wordsworth's Tour of Scotland (Wordsworth [1803] 1981) which includes descriptions of part of my own route along the A82.This is not to suggest that the interval between the journey and the diary entry is immaterial, however.The latter sections of Wordsworth's Tour, written several months after the event, are markedly different in the depiction of the landscape than the earlier sections: less detailed, more schematic.
In terms of its contribution to the development of 'mobile methods' more broadly, this mode of data-collection is clearly best suited to modes of transport which are conducive of contemplative thought and daydreaming such as walking, driving and some modes of public transport rather than those where mind and body work together in the interest of efficiency and survival as is the case with cycling (Spinney 2011;Cox 2017;Popan 2020).This, in turn, relates to the undeniable bias towards the visual senses, and kinaesthetic sensation, in many of my diary entries.As I have explored elsewhere, this is characteristic of certain modes of driving (most notably 'cruising' (Pearce 2016, 123-155)), but not all.When driving 'slows down', for examplein order to check direction, enjoy the view, or endure congestionwindows open and other sensory stimulants flood back into the car (see Pearce 2016, 59-90).However, there is no denying that, on the open road, and in a modern 'sealed car' with the windows shut, it is the visual and kinaesthetic that dominate.Further, it is arguably the temporary exclusion of the other senses that facilitates the transcendental, dis-embodied thinking that distinguishes driving from other forms of mobility for better or worse.
Autoethnography is, nevertheless, a complex, multi-staged process which, in my case, entails a 'second-level' analysis of the diary entries.This layering of interpretation facilitates the adoption of a standpoint that remains attentive to the ontology of the experience recorded in the primary text at the same time as returning the discussion to wider theoretical and political debates.In line with the practice of the 'personal experience narrative' autoethnography identified by Butz and Besio (2009, 165), my project thus aims to shed new light on the phenomenological and psychological driving space of the road through situated analysis 'which involves but exceed[s]' my personal experience.At the same time, while my social and cultural positioning as a driver is implicit rather than explicit in what follows, material factors such as social mobility, age and gender most certainly do inform the nature of the journeys undertaken.For example, my latter-day journeys to Cornwall saw me performing, or reprising, the role of the 'dutiful daughter', while my travels between Lancaster and Scotland constitute a long-distance commute that enacts the privileges of my professional life as an academic.Further, while ageing has yet to impact on how I approach long-distance drives (e.g. the need for more frequent rest breaks) this may become a factor in the future.According to Elaine Stratford, writing on changing mobility practices in the context of growing old, tiredness is a defining feature of ageing (Stratford 2016) andas the flashing message on the motorway gantry reminds uswhen it comes to driving 'Tiredness Kills'.To date, however, my car (four generations of VW Passat Estate) has functioned as a privileged (if illusory) 'safe' travel space which not only offers physiological comfort (Sheller 2004;Kent 2015) and 'thinking time' but also privacy, security and continuity to a woman travelling on her own (albeit with three generations of dogs).

Departure
While it may be assumedin the context of journeyingthat every departure will be unique on account of the wide-ranging and volatile contextual features that inform it, my research suggests that many journeys made from Place A to Place B are experienced in strikingly similar ways.This is especially the case if the journey has become routine (e.g. the commute) or if it is repeated on a regular basis (e.g. the drive to a favourite holiday destination).Literary texts which report upon departuresincluding many traveloguesoften include vivid and highly-charged descriptions of the moment of departure (e.g.Struther [1939] 1989) and point to the signal role expectation (based on previous experiences) plays.As Fort observes in the introduction to his book on the A303, the excitement and expectation associated with setting off is often projected onto the landscapes/roadscapes through which the traveller passes (Fort 2012, xxii).However, it is the role the roadscape plays in structuring these perceptions, cognitions and affects that I am principally concerned with here, as well the way in which changes to the travel environment disturb, challenge or erode that experience.
To appreciate the impact of such change on the phenomenology of driving we nevertheless need to begin with what was previously reproducible.The language I use to describe my journeys to Cornwall in my millennial chapter sets the scene in this respect, with words such as 'always' indicating how, even in the 1990s, my thoughts and feelings had become habituated: [When] driving, I am nearly always happy.Driving towards almost anywhere makes me excited, expectant: full of hope … driving into Cornwall, in high summer, with the sun blazing, and the fringing oceans meeting the cloudless skies in a fine strip of prussian blue will always be a special thing.(Pearce 2000, 164) We also see the way in which the moment of departure fuses with the moment of arrival in the traveller's imagination and the extent to which the singular journey has been subsumed into the oft-repeated one.Further, as in Fort's account of driving the A303 cited above, iconic landmarks channel thoughts and emotions.
My departures 'home' to Scotland over the past quarter-century are inscribed by similarly reproducible thought-processes and affects, although here the euphoria is typically yoked with relief and is untainted by the knowledge that my return to the family home often ended in disappointment.In the August of 1999following a quick turn-around at Lancasterthe emotion associated with this phase of the journey is further spiked by exhaustion, with the long (six hour) drive into the sunset taking on a surreal quality: Forty-eight hours later, I leave Lancaster and begin the final stage of my journey north.It is six o'clock in the evening, and already the August sun is getting low, the traffic thinning, and by the time I get to Shap summit, the sunset has officially begun.This, then, accompanies me all the way to Loch Lomond where I make my final stop for coffee.By this time I am euphoric, and almost as witless as I was two mornings ago.My throat aching with exhaustion and emotion, I take ten minutes to walk on the beach, and look up at the Ben.(Pearce 2000, 173) As well as illustrating the altered states of consciousness brought about by certain modes of driving (see Pearce 2016, 66-97), this is another instance of a driving-event which collapses the moment of departure with the moment of arrival.In the space of two sentences, I have left Lancaster and arrived at Loch Lomond and am within fifty-miles of home; meanwhile, the 'milestones' marking that distance have been distilled into two iconic landmarks: Shap summit and Ben Lomond.There is a further significance to this, not immediately visible here, which speaks to the qualitatively different post-millennial journeys to which I am about to turn: namely, the 'open road' which has made this frictionless journey possible.Not only does the 'thin' traffic make travelling this distance in the space of one evening logistically possible but also facilitates the transcendent, time-and space-defying driving experience.Were conditions otherwise, I would simply not have been able conflate departure and arrival with such a simple leap of the imagination.
My more recent departureswhen travelling south, especiallyare a testament to how changing road conditions can impact upon driver-cognition.The first few miles of a long journey are crucial for setting its tenor, and what we see in my accounts of journeys made in August 2015 (Pearce 2016, 51) and September 2019 is how anticipationand prospective, speculative thought in generalis blocked and undermined when a speedy getaway is reduced to a crawl: This journey proves to be an even more gruelling one: eleven hours of heavy traffic, congestion and hold ups, and seriously bad weather.As in 2015, at Preston I join a three-lane phalanx of vehicles which accompanies me all the way to Exeter, but the torrential rainof cloud-burst proportions between Birmingham and Bristolmakes moving with the erratic flow much harder.(R/D 2019) With the destination lost from view, both these journeys return me, the driver, to the here and now with a jolt.Instead of my first view of the Cornish coastline imprinting itself upon my forward-leaping imagination as in 1999, I am materially and figuratively trapped on a pad of tarmac that has ceased to roll itself out in front of me and, for once, I am forced to acknowledge the notional 'placeless-ness' of the road upon which I travel: Such is the anonymous nature, for me, of this stretch of motorwayand so frequent are the subsequent hold-upsthat I struggle to locate precisely where the problem started … Mostly this stretch of the journey is grey (like the tarmac, the concrete central reservation, the sky), dusty and unremarkable.(Pearce 2016, 52) It is nevertheless significant thaton my 2015 journey -I quickly search for landmarks that will serve to relocate me: A few somatic 'body memories' nevertheless make themselves felt; for example, the rise and dip of the road as I approach Sandbach Services.Similarly, the brown 'heritage' direction sign for Stapeley Water Garden, near Nantwich, activates a schema stored deep in my memory.(Pearce 2016, 52) In the face of the radical defamiliarisation of the route occasioned by congestion, I find myself seeking re-assurance from landmarks and body memories experienced on previous journeys.This speaks to my central thesis regarding the profound disorientation road-users can experience when an environment known through habitual actions is transformed either suddenly or, more subtly, over time.The temporary loss of spatial coordinates also means that I no longer know exactly where I am in terms of 'journey time': how long until I arrive at my next service station stop, for example.'Losing our way' en route to an erstwhile familiar location in this way not only undermines well-honed body memories but also challenges the cognitive frameworks and narratives associated with the phase of the journey in question.The relief implicit in my recognition of the Stapeley Water Garden sign is indicative here; latching on to this familiar landmark enables me to 'relocate': not only in terms of this particular journey but all my journeys to Cornwall over the past twenty years.

Intermission
There is also no escaping the crucial anchoring role played by service stations and other stopping places on long-distance journeys.As evidenced in motoring literature dating back to the early twentieth century, these 'spaces of intermission' are both integral to, and defining of, the driving-event (Merriman 2011).As well as being interim destinations in their own right, the euphemistic 'rest break' is also a 'mind break' which typically disrupts and brings to a halt the trains of thought that may have dominated the preceding phase of the journey: an opportunity to re-set the dial and recharge the batteries in more ways than one.This is certainly the case with the journeys to Cornwall recorded in my auto/biographies, with Taunton Deane Services (Somerset) performing a pivotal role in re-grounding both my thoughts and my emotions.Although frequently written about as anonymous and hence alienating spaces (e.g.Trigg 2012, 135-148), their familiarityand, indeed, their 'transportability' (see Pearce 2021 on 'transportable place')means that they function as welcome spatial-temporal harbours for long-distance travellers.
In my millennial chapter, Taunton Deane features as an intensely remembered vignette, its routine familiarity rendered unheimlich on account of the unusual weather conditions: Taunton Deane service station is blisteringly hot, even at this relatively early hour.The embankment grass is burnt to orange and the buzzing insects make me think of the summer I spent in Indiana three years ago.With the coffee some of my powers of observation begin to reconstitute … and when I eventually get back to the car again I mentally shake myself awake.(Pearce 2000, 172) Although not acknowledged in the chapter itself, it is perhaps not surprising that this was also the occasion/location where I formulated my 'prophecy' on the future of road transport in Britain (Pearce 2000, 116).As I stood on the embankment over-looking the car park, taking in the sheer volume of cars and the freaky weather prescient of climate change, it became suddenly clear that none of this was sustainable and that 'the intricate network of roads that presently serves to connect even the further extremities of these islands … [would] soon … grind to an economic and environmental standstill' (Pearce 2000(Pearce , 2016)).Twenty years on, the scenario I had in mind is no longer a prophecy but a contingency, with my prediction that it would soon be impossible to travel from Scotland to Cornwall in two days becoming true on account of gridlocks of the most material kind.Yet what is striking about the accounts of my visits to the services in both 2015 and 2019 is that, on first inspection, nothing appeared to have changed: I arrive at Taunton Deane Services before 10am and am surprised how empty it isespecially compared to the motorway itself.This is a relief, and reassuringespecially when I take my dog for a walk and see that nothing much had changed in the general feel or layout of the site.I climb the grassy slope to the wooded area that fringes the perimeter fence as I did nearly thirty years ago with my first dog … As we wander back along the crest of the hill, I survey the car park more closely and notice, for the first time, that two electric charging stations have been installed.I stop to take a photo (Figure 2).(R/D 2019) As my entry goes on to record, this topographically familiar space nevertheless proves to be more changed than initially appeared: Once inside the main building, I see that it has been subject to a major refit and that multiple new outlets have replaced the large cafeteria that still dominated the complex even four and a half years ago.Costa has also taken over the separate building opposite the main entrance, and I now struggle to remember what it was in its previous incarnations … It is only as I make my way back to my car, however, that I am reminded that something else is missing.A vehicle is now parked at one of the EV stations, the driver standing next to his vehicle, drinking a coffee while making a call on his mobile (Figure 3).Alongside my interest in seeing at least one EV being charged, I am suddenly reminded that there are no longer any phone booths outside the service station entrance.(R/D 2019) What these entries record, then, is not only the material changes that will have been visited on most British service stations in this twenty year period (e.g. unit refits that reflect changing consumer demand; new models for the leasing and management of service stations (see Morrison and Minnis 2012, 316)), but also changes in visitor habits.On this occasion, my body memory's familiarity with the dog walking area and general layout of the car park belied the seismic behavioural changes afforded by digital technology over the past two decades; for example, the the shift to mobile phones inclining us to return to our cars to drink our coffee, phone home, do business, rather than spend time in the restaurant.The EV charging stations, meanwhile, are a tangible sign of the other change that is now upon us: the world's supposed commitment to rapid decarbonisation (although the fact that there are still only two chargers in a carpark designed for hundreds of cars would indicate that there is little 'rapid' about it).

Arrival
As explored above, because of the expectations by which it is overdetermined, it is is often difficult to dissociate the end of a journey from its beginning.While some bad travel experiences can be turned aroundas the result of a sudden improvement in weather conditions, for examplethe frustration, anxiety or all-round sense of doom associated with a difficult departure can be hard to mitigate once a negative narrative has begun to take shape in the traveller's mind.My text-based research has nevertheless shown that the final leg of a long journeywith the destination firmly in viewsees drivers and passengers newly alert to their surroundings regardless of how the journey has gone thus far.There is always a moment when more abstracted expectations translate into practical concerns about what is awaiting us and what we might have to adapt to.Figured thus, the highly-charged descriptions of my own arrivals 'home'both in Cornwall and Scotlandshould not be unexpected.There are, however, significant differences in how these stories are told that speak to both the nature of the emotions invested in the destination, the time that has elapsed since the previous visit and the way in which any changes to the road infrastructure and/or driving practice are experienced.As we shall see, more ambiguous thoughts and emotions can be especially susceptible to an adverse encounter with change.
On some journeysnotably those that begin wellit is possible that the anxieties associated with arrival may be deferred until the destination is less than 30 minutes away.This was certainly the case on many of my pre-millennial journeys to Cornwall.As long as I remained on the A30the 60-mile strip of dual-carriageway which is the closest Cornwall has ever come to a motorwayit was possible to remain suspended, euphoricas my entry from August 1999 illustrates: Apart from some new stretches of dual-carriageway and the wind farm at Four Burrows, this road, for one thing, never seems to change.It will always be here to take me home.It will always be here to provide me with my dream of home: the last breath, the suspended moment, before arrival.Cornwall as seen from the A30: no longer a country in which I live, perhaps, but one to which I am obliged to return again and again.(Pearce 2000, 164) What is remarkable about this description, twenty years on is the fact that two major transformations to the roadscapethe siting of a wind farm and a new stretch of dual-carriageway fails to dint my impression that this is an environment that 'never changes'.Even as the language in which the description is couched signals that this is a vision distilled through an act of the 'phenomenological imagination' (Bachelard [1960] 1971and Pearce 2019, 66-67), so it appears that the gravitational pull of the moment of arrival performs a key role in consolidating the impression.
It was always when I left the A30, however, and entered the maze of small lanes in which my parents' home was located that I would suddenly 'wake up' and the feelings of anxiety and doubt crash in.This was typically associated with a heightened apprehension of my surroundings as, with my speed reduced to 20 or 30 mph, I began to attend to what had changed since I was last there (see Pearce 2016, 54).Meanwhile, my gruelling eleven-hour journey south in 2019 delivered an exceptionally stressful denouement to my journeying.On this occasion, the congestion encountered on the A30 either side of Truro completely robbed the moment of sentiment: When I reach the A39 I discover that this is just as clogged with stationary traffic as the A30 and immediately turn tail and head for the back lanes again.The rural landscape of my childhood is well and truly 'semi-rural' now, with only the odd farmindeed, only the odd fieldsandwiched amongst houses.Yet the roadsor rather lanesthemselves have barely changed at all.They still wind one way and then another in an endless succession of bends and pitch the cars up and down steep and narrow hills … It's nearly dark now, and I'm presented with a new driving challenge: the size of the average domestic car.Twenty years ago, two cars could pass on the wider lanesbends includedwith no problem at all; it was only lorries and tractors that you had to stop for.Today, however, the grossly inflated size of all models of vehicle means that this is no longer possible … repeatedly I am forced to stop, recalculate the road width, and give way to a large SUV.(R/D 2019) Notable here is the extent to which my body memory of the once-familiar roadscape has been challenged.Even though the morphology and camber of (unimproved) roads are among the last thing to change when a district is developed, the transformation of the driving environment through qualitatively different road conditionsin this case, re-sized vehiclesmeans that that one of my last remaining footholds in the spatial past has been destroyed.Indeed, the disorientation I experienced was so complete that I became totally lost and took a further hour to locate my holiday accommodation.
To date, my arrivals in Scotland have been spared such bad surprises.This is partly because where I live has been subject to less development, partly because I am absorbing incremental changes to the environment on a day to day basisbut also because I relate to my destination in a different way.Even in 1999 I was mindful of the deeply subjective nature of the temporalities associated with the latter phase of any journey home, observing: [Arriving in Scotland] … there is none of the traumatic dis-integration that accompanies my arrival 'home' in Cornwall.This is a chronotopic space/place where the 'travelling towards' is not undermined by a sudden, violent appropriation of 'the past'.It is a space/place where, even as I arrive, I am still 'travelling towards'.(Pearce 2000, 173) In other words, whatever the road conditions or other markers of change that accompany me on this last phase of my journey, the moment of arrival is guaranteed to be familiar on account of the everyday practices which tether my current home to the recent past and emerging future.
And yet, no home is an island.In recent yearsand post-lockdownthe west coast of Scotland has seen more tourist traffic than it has for years.During the summer months, I now prefer to stay very local (most of my walks and drives are limited to a five-mile radius) with food shopping in Oban (11 miles away) figuring as my longest journey by car for months on end.I reflect upon the implications of this in the conclusion that follows, but present it here as a coda to the changes to the British roadscape over the past quarter-century that this discussion has sought to record.While the habitual nature of certain modes of travel can insulate us against changewith sensations, affects and thought-processes bound to re-assuringly familiar spatial-temporal horizons (see Kent 2015)others disorientate and disturb.

Analysis: 'I couldn't see the road for the cars'
The selective nature of the diary material presented here means that I have focused more on motorway drivingand the transformation of the driving experience due to congestion and arrhythmic travel (see Edensor 2010Edensor , 2014) ) and less on changes to the roadscape per se which dominate my accounts of driving in Scotland.Indeed, what consumes the representations of the journey south in the 2015/2019 texts is my dismay at the end of the comparatively frictionless motoring that characterised my pre-millennial journeys and journeying.Instead of centring and (re)locating the traveller in relation to their past, present and emerging future, the disturbed spatial-temporal coordinates of the road block the past and blur the future.This, in turn, confirms the extent to which revisionary cognitive processes are dependent upon reliable repetitive practices: and, in the UK today, no long-distance journey by motor vehicle is reliable anymore.At its worst, then, a 'bad journey' through a defamiliarised landscape has the capacity to threaten the very integrity of the traveller for whom it once served as a complex reference point.And, in the case of my own recent car-journeys to Cornwall, that has been a consequence of other vehiclesliterally, as well as figurativelyblocking the view.As I observe in one of my diaries, there were times when I could no longer see the road for the cars.
As noted at the beginning of this article, the theories that best make sense of these findings in terms of traveller-experience are to be found in recent cultural-geographical engagements with time-space, place memory, kinaesthetics and place attachment and it is to these I now turn in my further analysis of our changing roadscapes.Beginning with time-space, it is my hope that the preceding analysis has captured something of the special properties of time spent on the road.As I have explored elsewhere (Pearce 2014(Pearce , 2016)), literary representations of motoring have provided us with an important window onto how drivers and passengers experience time differently: from epic road trips, to holiday getaways, to everyday commutes, to 'therapeutic' highway cruising (Didion [1971] 2011).In the space of such journeys we see time variously stretch and expand, condense or collapse, or take the driver and passenger to a place that is seemingly 'out of time' (Pearce 2017).Key to this creative misapprehension of time spent within the car is the temporal/spatial schema imposed by journeying itself: a practice which carves up 'drivetime' into segments, or zones, which take their cue from landmarks on the road but otherwise constitute a time-space (i.e.chronotope) which is distinct from that of the external world.What my own post-millennial long-distance journeys confirm is that, powerful as the schema that shape these spatial-temporal zones are, they are not immune to changes in the roadscape or the driving experience: the disappearance of a long familiar landmark, the re-alignment of a stretch of highway, the volume of traffic and the re-scaling of vehicles can all tear the protective skin of the chronotope and project the driver or passenger into a parallel universe which is shockingly unfamiliar (see Robertson [2012, 85]).My auto/biographical extracts record several of these 'Where am I?' moments and evidence the extent to which temporality and spatiality are truly inextricable in the 'chronotope of the road' (Bakhtin [1981] 2020).For while the practice of journeying I have described might, on first inspection, appear to depend upon a highly subjective and transcendental refiguring of time as the driver scrolls through their past and future life during the different phases of the journey, the process is still critically anchored in space and place via landmarks and body memories that are, themselves, reproducible.
Meanwhile, the role of body memory in mediating changes to familiar roads also informs our kinaesthetic experience of the roadscape.In line with previous writing and theorising on the subject (e.g.Banham [1971Banham [ ] 1973;;Merriman 2006;Robertson 2012;Merriman 2011;Borden 2012) my road diaries have revealed the extent to which our apprehension of the landscape unscrolling through the windscreen is dependent upon a velocity appropriate to the road in question.A concrete and glass cityscape gleaming brightly in the sun, and glimpsed fleetingly through windscreens and side windows in 'shifting proximity' (Robertson 2012, 75), may figure as a thing of beauty when apprehended at speed but will be seen quite differently when the traffic is reduced to a crawl.Indeed, the same kinaesthetic principle may be seen to apply to other road types inasmuch as there is arguably an ideal, or appropriate, speed for viewing the roadscape in question: if our speed is cut significantly -as when a slow vehicle creates a long queue of trafficthe bodily sensation that feeds and complements the visual aesthetic will fade and a potentially sublime landscape become fragmented and unremarkable.Only on narrow country lanes, where a car's speed may be slowed to what feels like walking pace, does slowness enhance the kinaesthetic experience of the roadscape, as the 'driver-car' (Dant 2004) probes the environment with a curiosity that is less specular, more multi-sensory (see Pearce 2016, 59-90).What the diary extracts presented here also make clear, however, is that our kinaesthetic experience of any and every type of road will be undermined by road conditions that significantly interrupt the flow of the journey (e.g. an accident, congestion, a diversion), thus confirming the integral role preexisting schema play in directing our attention during different journey-phases.This explains why, on my frictionless drive to Cornwall in 1999, the new wind farm on the A30 did nothing to dent the euphoria of my homecoming but the unexpected congestion encountered on the same stretch of road in 2015 and 2019 did.
As noted in the introduction, the road is a curious case when it comes to long-standing, cross-disciplinary debates on place memory and place attachment on account of its ephemerality and the variable nature of the relationships it inspires depending upon whether we live, work, or travel upon it.It is nevertheless clear thatfor driversall manner of road features can inspire powerful attachments on account of their role as markers in both the physical journey and that of memory and the imagination.Therefore, although the demolition of roadside architectureespecially housingmay be especially devastating in the case of the individuals who live or work on the road in question (the story told so powerfully in Platt's Leadville [2001]), the disappearance of a well-loved cafe or truck stop can engender its own sense of loss in drivers, bikers and cyclists who travel a road frequently.In the diary extracts considered here, the pressure of this sort of lossboth actual and impendingis especially graphic in my return visits to Taunton Deane services where haptic familiarity with the largely unchanged spatial layout is ousted by intellectual recognition of the subtle transformations being wrought by new technologies and everyday behaviours.By this means, a once dependable 'driving space' is compromised in ways that both threaten and inspire place attachment; indeed, Jeffrey Smith identifies 'vanishing places' (Smith 2018, 10) as a category of growing importance in his typology of contemporary place attachment.While the sort of environments Smith perceives to be under threat from 'destruction', 'depletion', 'encroachment' and 'restriction' (Smith 2018, 11-12) are typically those resulting from urbanisation, a glance through the pages of SABRE's 'Road Register' reveals how, for some, roads are themselves historical monuments, recreational spaces and nature corridors in need of preservation.Elsewhere in my writings, changes to the natural and historical landscape of Loch Lomondside frequently inspire this order of place attachment, especially in the context of the long-awaited upgrade to the northern reaches of the route which will include (inter alia) the further demolition of ancient stone walls dating back to the road's construction in 1752-1754.
Across these discussions of Britain's changing roadscapesand the implications of that change for the practice I have described as journeyingthe common marker of change from the traveller's perspective is the sense and sensation of disorientation: necessarily complex in expression, but typically routed through the body.The unsurprising thesis which emerges here is that the embodied, performative, and co-constitutive nature of motoring (as well as cycling and, in other contexts, walking) underpins all aspects of the traveller's engagement with the road upon which they travel, including those encounters which serve to disorientate rather than centre and locate.This premise follows Seamon's proposition in Life Takes Place (2018) that the destruction of familiar places, whether incremental and domestic or cataclysmic, can prove devastating for the individuals and communities thus afflicted.With specific reference to road environments, Harvey and Knox illustrate what such disorientation can mean in practical terms with stories of local drivers sustaining serious accidents as a result of major highway reconstruction in Peru: 'missing the curves or failing to align their vehicles with new bridges' (Harvey and Knox 2015, 113-114).Similarly, my own diaries record the disorientation of the emplaced body across a variety of contexts including changes to the road morphology and surface, the re-scaling or motor vehicles and the way in which the stop-start motoring associated with congestion can make a once familiar stretch of road radically unfamiliar.
It is, however, the way in which these sensitivities of the body subject inform the cognitive disorientation of the travelling subject in terms of journeying that has been my principle concern in this article: notably, the way in which any disturbance to those locations, landmarks or adjustments to road lay-out mediated through the body subsequently impact upon cognition, memory and affect.Both past experiences and present-time expectations perform a crucial function here, since it is through the relay of schema known in the past and projected onto the future that a linear, unfolding space is apprehended.This is the mechanism thatin line with Bergson's account of the functioning of 'habit memory' (Bergson [1908] 2000; Pearce 2019, 61-64)enables us to navigate new (yet similar) physical locations and, I would contend, also features in the management of the unfolding cognitive horizons of long-distance journeys.Indeed, the extent to which we can be disoriented by a disturbance to pre-existing schema is evidence of how powerful those expectations are.In the road diaries shared here, this order of disorientation is best illustrated by the story of my arrival in Cornwall, late at night, in 2019.On this occasion, changes to the natural and physical roadscape, along with the re-scaling of motor vehicles themselves, renders the once-familiar warren of narrow lanes shockingly unfamiliar and results in me becoming seriously lost.Further, this phase of my journeyi.e.'arrival'can no longer be re-assuringly mapped onto previous journeys with the consequence that one of the long-standing narratives securing my life-journey stutters and falls silent.

Conclusion
By investigating the transformation of the Britain's roadscapes through the practice of journeying I have sought to initiate a debate into some of the rather less-than-obvious impacts of change in the lives of road users.While my particular focus here has been on long-distance driving, many of the cognitive processes I discuss will also apply to shorter journeysand, in some aspects, they will also apply to other forms of transportation.The thesis that has emerged from these investigationswhich includes previous research on representations of driving in literary texts and the testimonies of road enthusiastsis that the degradation of the driving and passengering experience has impacted profoundly upon travellers' relationship to the roadscapes through which they pass.In the 1930s novel, Mrs Miniver, the narrator describes the way in which certain features in the landscape functioned as 'memory flags' on the family's annual drive to Scotland (Struther [1939] 1989), raising the question of what happens to the process of journeying when those flags disappear from Britain's roadscape or are otherwise obscured.My own diarieswritten across the watershed of the twenty and twenty-first centuriesprovide a partial answer.
In terms of wider debates on the history and future of transport in the UK, the disorientation and disappointment that marked my journeys to Cornwall in 2015 and 2019 will deliver few surprises.The annual reports of the Office of National Statistics, which chart the year-on-year increase in road transport for the years I have been travelling my north-south route tell us that the experience of driving in Britain over the past quarter century must inevitably have been changed (see Note 4).What such statistics fail to capture, however, is the extent to which the transformation of that experienceas the consequence of congestion and 'stop-start' driving in particularis quietly tipping us towards the moment when motorists engaged in non-essential travel will finally abandon automobility and opt for alternative mobilities or, indeed, no-mobilities (Dennis and Urry 2009;Manderscheid 2014;Meinherz and Fritz 2021).In terms of the radical behavioural changes needed in the light of the climate emergency this is arguably an appropriate and positive outcome, though the profound role journeyingas I have defined it herehas played in motorists' lives also signals the measure of the loss.Given the enormous significance of landmarks and stopping places in structuring both material and subjective journey-time, there is, perhaps, a need to recover the quality of the journey by making travel less (purportedly) seamless, more staged.In the context of a multi-modal transport future, there are surely opportunities to, once again, convert interim destinations into final destinations and thus respond to the first principles of the mobility transition which requires us to move less fast, less frequently and less far (Adey et al. 2022, 38).On this point, it is worth noting that I currently have no immediate plans to make a return journey to Cornwall by car, even though there are days when I have strong desire to do so.Likewise, and as mentioned above, the driving I do when at home in Scotland has a shrinking circumference.However, there is also no escaping the historical significance of the long-distance drive for myself and others born in the previous century (see also Moran 2009, 242).

Notes
1.An early version of this paper was presented to the 'Mobility and Migration Group' at the University of British Columbia in 2000 and a more recent version to the T2M conference in Padua in 2022.Many thanks to participants for their feedback.2. It should nevertheless be noted that while this article speaks indirectly to recent debates on mobility and the lifecourse (e.g.Holdsworth 2013, Stratford 2015, Murray and Robertson 2016, Pearce 2019) this is not the primary object of enquiry in this article.Rather than attending to the significance of mobilities of different kinds during the various phases of the lifecourse, my focus here is on the significance of recursive journeying (along familiar routes) in creating a continuity of embodied, cognitive and affective traveller-experience that may be disturbed by the changing road environment.
3. 'Driving Event': the term I devised to account for the way in which every journey by car is potentially unique on account of the variable factors that inform it including the driver or passenger's thought-processes during the journey.See Pearce 2014Pearce , 2016Pearce , 2017 for a full exploration of this concept.4. Statistics from the Department of Transport reveal that the number of licensed cars on the road increased from 27.2 million in 2000 to 32.7 million in 2020.However, there has also been a large increase in LGVs during that time with the result that the total number of vehicles on British roads in 2021 was recorded as 39.2 million (www.gov.uk).Road Traffic Estimates (2020) also reveal that it is motorways that have born the brunt of the increase in vehicle miles over the past two decades.Despite the pandemic, 'in 2020, 60 per cent of all vehicles miles were travelled on motorways and, on an average day, 44 times more vehicles travelled along a typical stretch of motorway than a typical stretch of minor road' (see www.racfoundation.org).