ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the tensions are played out through experiences of driving in the countryside. It examines of how the seemingly contradictory forces of development and preservation, technology and nature, speed and stillness are interwoven through the pages of the Shell County Guides produced in the 1930s. The rationale behind the journey was to document the many and various ways that the British countryside was, in Nairn's eyes, being consumed by agents of modern development. Roads and their accompanying infrastructure are widely seen not as part of the rural locations in which they are situated, but more as ribbon-like metropolitan enclaves which flap loosely across the countryside, tethered intermittently by their urban destinations. The type of planting that was most appropriate to the new landscape of speed that the motorway represented were long and passionately fought. The two main players in this encounter were the Institute of Landscape Architects (ILA) and the Roads Beautifying Association (RBA).
