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A plague of potholes ravages the roads of the UK, causing a whopping £474 million worth of damage in the last year alone. Solving the issue is something parties think might win them votes, with the Conservatives pledging £8.3 billion in their manifesto and Labour promising to fix one million potholes a year if elected.
The road ahead might be bumpy but it’s worth looking back at how we got to our current patchwork tarmac situation. Lauren Colley, an expert in pedestrianism, writes about the various solutions to the terrible roads that the Victorians devised. From cobblestones so noisy Charles Dickens said they drove a friend to an early grave to wooden roads that soaked up gallons of horse urine leaving London smelly and yellow, our roads have always been rage-inducing.
Paving over potholes appears unlikely to be enough to return Rishi Sunak to No.10 on July 4, as his party seems poised to suffer major defeat, and a handful of ambitious MPs look set to join a battle to replace him. Using the model of Shakespeare’s most ambitious family, the Macbeths, Stefan Stern has some words of caution for the most ruthless among them.
The spectre of COVID and the lockdown years hangs over this election. And it often seems like there’s a new potential pandemic for us to be worried about every week. Ed Hutchinson offers practical advice on working out how worried you should be about any new animal virus.
All the best,
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