Professor Jeremy Black:
The consumer demand created by the industrial revolution presented both a huge opportunity and a problem for manufacturers.There was great potential to sell more goods, but the terrible state of Britain’s roads meant that transporting raw materials and finished products safely and quickly was virtually impossible.
In the 16th and 17th century was the road system was very bad, parishes were responsible for maintaining the highway within their boundaries. But the problem was that if you lived in one parish, say the parish of Stoke over here, and you knew that your neighbours in the next door parish, the parish of Leek over here, just weren’t maintain their roads, in fact that they were a potholed nightmare. Why should you maintain your road on your side of the boundary, because all it was going to do, was lead to the terrible road on the other side?
The result was an absolute nightmare for travellers.
Parliament was willing to pass new laws to support trade. In 1706 it passed an Act which allowed local businessmen to build and run permanent turnpike roads. In return they could charge travellers a toll for using their road, and some of the money would then be spent on maintaining it. Other Turnpike Acts soon followed.
Nowhere was the need more pressing than in north Staffordshire. Here the potteries would become one of Britain’s greatest industrial centres. But when Wedgwood and his fellow businessmen first set up their factories, there were no reliable roads to bring in raw materials.
And mules had to carry fragile ceramics to market in panniers, unsurprisingly a third of the wares were broken along the way pushing up the price of the surviving pieces.
In 1763 Josiah Wedgwood brought transport revolution to Staffordshire, thwarted by the problems of getting his goods to market, he petitioned parliament to build a turnpike road from his potteries at Burslem over there to the Red Bull on the London Road.
This map shows the route which was propsed, a route which would join the potteries to the national road network.
From 1706 the length of turnpike roads increased from a mere 300 miles to an incredible 15,000 miles just 70 years later.
Improving the roads increased the movement of goods and ideas around the country, and reduced journey times, which further stimulated the economy and helped drive the industrial revolution forward.
Video summary
In the early 1700s Britain’s road networks were simply not up to the task of moving the goods around the country which needed to be moved.
Most of the roads were ancient, potholed and too small for modern business to be carried out.
As Britain began to industrialise, this lack of transport made it very difficult to transport raw materials like coal or cotton.
It was especially difficult for a businessman like Josiah Wedgwood, who reckoned that he sometimes lost one third of his shipments of pottery on Britain’s terrible roads.
In 1706 Parliament passed the Turnpike Act which allowed private road builders to build new roads and charge tolls for using them.
It was a first, important step towards the road transport network we know in Britain today.
This short film is from the BBC series, Why the Industrial Revolution Happened Here.
Teacher Notes
Using the character of Josiah Wedgwood as a focus, but including material from the whole clip, students could identify all the information required to write a letter from Wedgwood to his local MP.
Your students should put their points across clearly, stating a case for a turnpike road to built in Stoke.
This short film is suitable for teaching history at Key Stage 3 and GCSE, Third Level and National 4 & 5, in particular units on the Victorians and the Industrial Revolution.
Josiah Wedgwood: Genius of the Industrial Revolution. video
Professor Jeremy Black explores Josiah Wedgwood's innovative ways of marketing and advertising his pottery, including opening the first ever showroom.
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Professor Jeremy Black shows how, at the birth of the Industrial Revolution, Britain's political and economic climate allowed inventive minds to blossom.
The growth of industry and factory towns in Britain. video
Professor Jeremy Black explains how the invention of factories completely changed the nature of work and made Birmingham one of Britain's largest cities.
The importance of coal in the Industrial Revolution. video
Professor Jeremy Black digs deeper into our industrial past and finds that Britain sat on top of bountiful coal deposits, perfect to power newly-invented steam engines.
The transport revolution: Britain's canal network. video
Canals were the motorways of the 1700s, says Professor Jeremy Black. Building them took huge amounts of money and some incredible feats of engineering.
