Emplacing Change on the Road

This chapter combines a phenomenological overview of the physical transformations that have altered the materiality and culture of Britain’s roads (including the experience of driving them) most profoundly since the 1990s with a theoretical enquiry into how such change becomes visible to road-users and road-dwellers. A wide variety of disciplines and philosophies (including the phenomenology of perception and memory) are engaged in order to answer this question, and their principles tested via the autoethnographic analysis, which confirms the complexity of the processes involved. This is the most substantive chapter of the book on account of its centrality to the whole project and the overview of informing theories.