Book review: A Motoring History of the Kennet Valley

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The local motoring history book is by now a familiar concept. Individuals with a fondness both for motoring and their local area have often sought to trace the relationship between the two. It's a fascinating area for exploration, but such efforts are often immediately identifiable as the work of enthusiastic amateurs: softback books with grainy pictures and brief explanatory captions.

A Motoring History of the Kennet Valley raises the bar considerably. Roger Day is a prominent local historian and Tim Green is a local pre-war car enthusiast, and between them they have produced a book which has been researched in minute detail and finished to an uncommonly high standard. The book spans the period from 1900, when a section of the RAC Thousand Mile Trial passed from Reading to Marlborough, up to c.1980, but the majority of the content is from those halcyon days before motorways and congestion turned motoring from a pleasure into a chore.

Among the pictures of street scenes and garage forecourts, there is some surprising content. A car dressed up with false crocodile jaws for a 1914 carnival procession is just about identifiable as a Ford Model T, purportedly representing Futurist art. We are treated to a page of information and several good-quality pictures pertaining to the EJYR, a steam car made in Highclere from 1907 to 1912. The better-known HE, built in Caversham, gets a briefer mention.

A significant chapter is devoted to local petrol stations and garages, but space is also given to the history of road signs in the region. Day and Green have written detailed, well-researched histories for each garage they mention, and sourced an array of interesting pictures. One which stands out is from the Laurel Garage in Ramsbury in 1970, showing a brand-new Ford Cortina alongside an Austin Atlantic, a vintage Renault and the garage's freshly-restored Ford Model TT. Other pictures span everything from a sporting Bugatti to a 'cammy' Morris Minor with a rather uncomfortable-looking home-made body.

Transport cafés, a once-ubiquitous but now sadly disappearing part of our motoring landscape, get a chapter to themselves. Their inclusion is to be lauded, and their demise mourned, now that limp McDonald's burgers from soulless service stations make the fry-ups of old look like haute cuisine. Any one of the 'caffs' included could have been the setting for the 1950s film Hell Drivers.

Production-wise, the book is nicely bound and printed on excellent paper. The attractive dust jacket design imitates 1920s editions of The Motor, and the mostly black-and-white photographs are reproduced to as high a quality as can reasonably be expected. It goes without saying that it will appeal most to those who live in the Kennet Valley but, really, it is a valuable record for anyone with an interest in British motoring and social history.
 

A Motoring History of the Kennet Valley
Authors: Roger Day and Tim Green
Publisher: Countryside Books. 01635 43816 or www.countrysidebooks.co.uk
Price: £25.00. Hardback. 208 pages with hundreds of pictures
ISBN: 978-1846744051

Words: Zack Stiling

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