New Roads for Even Newer Roads

Two Rank Look at Life films on Britain's roads, the first New Roads for Old from 1959 recording the building of the first motorways, the second High Wide and Faster from 1963, when it's all about spectacular viaducts and ever bigger schemes.

Amazing that in this era such technical engineering feats were deemed the perfect fodder for cinema newsreels, to be presented in that familiar bumptious style by the narrator with a wink in his voice, as obsessed by the cups of tea drunk by the construction workers as by the epic feats they were embarked on.

The footage is amazing though, and I particularly love the section at the end of the second film, with the opening ceremony for the M2 motorway near Dover, and the mosaic and plaque unveiled in the services at Medway. Brings a human scale back to these projects, that are hard to imagine being built today.