1959 Batholomew's road atlas motorway supplement

[Mikeya]

Rather a nice inserted supplement to a 1959-ish Barts GB road atlas explaining the new motorways and reproducing entirely pages 28/29 showing the M1 along with inserts for the other early schemes.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/36844288@ ... 6866446934

[B1040]

Thank you for sharing that.
I noted a couple of points of interest.
Firstly, the M1 junctions to Luton are given names.
Secondly, they had overprinted the M1 onto a rather old base map that shows no sign of the growing new towns of Harlow or Stevenage and also rather under-estimates the amount of urban development in North West London.

[Robert Kilcoyne]

Rather a nice inserted supplement to a 1959-ish Barts GB road atlas explaining the new motorways and reproducing entirely pages 28/29 showing the M1 along with inserts for the other early schemes.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/36844288@ ... 6866446934

This reminds me of a later Bartholomew publication, the Motorway Atlas of Britain published in association with Autocar around 1973. It was very advanced for its time, with schematic motorway maps.

It is a pity that modern atlases do not include schematic maps for all of the major motorways; I can remember that the AA used to include some excellent diagrammatic motorway maps in its handbooks and in its Complete Atlas of Britain during the 1980's and early 1990's.

[owen b]

Thank you for sharing that.
I noted a couple of points of interest.
Firstly, the M1 junctions to Luton are given names.
Secondly, they had overprinted the M1 onto a rather old base map that shows no sign of the growing new towns of Harlow or Stevenage and also rather under-estimates the amount of urban development in North West London.

Interesting. Yes, the urban area depiction is very out of date. My house in Luton and the others around it were built in the mid 1950s and is a long way outside of the built up area according to the map.

I also note that the A5 Markyate bypass which was built in the late 1950s is portrayed clumsily.

[wrinkly]

I take it the Stretford-Eccles bypass isn't shown? Probably not on some of the MoT's lists as it was non-trunk.

At a quick glance the urban areas might be the same as in the atlas section of the 1950 AA Road Book (same base map?).

[B1040]

My father had a Newnes Atlas from about 1963 which had similar representations of urban areas. Hornchurch and Upminster were little villages.
I suspect that whoever updated the roads regularly had no brief to update anything else.

[Herned]

The Hemel Hempstead bypass in the image showing the lower end of the M1 is rather optimistic.. 30+ years before it opened!

[Big Nick]

I love the idea of the M1 stopping at the A428 in the middle of nowhere outside Rugby. Any pics of that?