Re: cars in the UK and car culture there - it took until the 1970s before at least half of households owned a car, and the number of cars on the road took off quite significantly during the Thatcher years - if I understand the stats correctly, from about 20 million in 1980 to 32.7 million in 2020, which was a pretty dramatic increase. Over the same time, you can definitely see the change from high street shops being supplemented by a supermarket in smaller towns and villages to shopping centers outside of the older built areas as bypass roads were constructed to get all those cars out of the way and moving faster. As an example, when we would drive from Newcastle (where my mother's parents lived) to Fife (where my father's parents lived) in the late 70s and early 80s, there were years where you'd have to drive through Edinburgh to the Forth road bridge and then work your way through Fife on the local roads through Kirkcaldy and various mining and fishing villages. The Edinburgh bypass made that unnecessary (and created the opportunity for large out of town shopping centers like Fort Kinnaird), south of the Forth, and by 2000 or so the combination of the A92 and the A915 made it possible to get to the grandparents in half the time without going through any of the coastal towns.... efficient, probably better for the people in the towns and villages in terms of not being inundated with cars, but less good for local commerce and seeing the sights, as it were.
Darn, all the photo links except for the cover shot seem to be missing in the ghostly version of the 1950s.
Re: cars in the UK and car culture there - it took until the 1970s before at least half of households owned a car, and the number of cars on the road took off quite significantly during the Thatcher years - if I understand the stats correctly, from about 20 million in 1980 to 32.7 million in 2020, which was a pretty dramatic increase. Over the same time, you can definitely see the change from high street shops being supplemented by a supermarket in smaller towns and villages to shopping centers outside of the older built areas as bypass roads were constructed to get all those cars out of the way and moving faster. As an example, when we would drive from Newcastle (where my mother's parents lived) to Fife (where my father's parents lived) in the late 70s and early 80s, there were years where you'd have to drive through Edinburgh to the Forth road bridge and then work your way through Fife on the local roads through Kirkcaldy and various mining and fishing villages. The Edinburgh bypass made that unnecessary (and created the opportunity for large out of town shopping centers like Fort Kinnaird), south of the Forth, and by 2000 or so the combination of the A92 and the A915 made it possible to get to the grandparents in half the time without going through any of the coastal towns.... efficient, probably better for the people in the towns and villages in terms of not being inundated with cars, but less good for local commerce and seeing the sights, as it were.