This article on the UK Design Museum site tells the story of the British motorway and general road signage system, designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. It begins:
Determined to illustrate the haphazard state of British road signage at the turn of the 1960s, the graphic designer Herbert Spencer drove from central London to the recently opened Heathrow London Airport and photographed each of the road signs that he came across along the way.
Perhaps it is time for someone to do something similar for the drive from Naas via the M50 ring-road to the Airport. It would certainly be an interesting project to do over a few Sunday mornings.
Hi Antoin finally got round to checking out your blog – I like it! On the history of motorways you can go back a lot further than the 60s – you can trace their lineage back centuries to the turnpikes which were effectively early forms of PPP where local landlords would collect tithes from passing coaches for the privilege of using the road – a bit like today’s tolling booths. The turnpike operators came to a sticky end when a mob lynched one of them and the magistrate said he couldn’t blame them – a moral in the story for the NRA maybe?! Check out the snap of us back on my blog btw – latest post. So long for now..