An extended and theoretically ambitious case study of a single highway, Driving Spaces draws on a wide range of disciplines and methods in order to account for the emergence of a new type of geographical environment in Britain. Specifically, the book recounts the history of “the first sections of the London to Yorkshire Motorway or M1,” which, when completed in 1959, first brought to Britain the type of high-speed, limited-access motorway that had already emerged two decades earlier in Germany, Italy, and the United States (3). Thoroughly researched and full of rich, at times overwhelming, detail, Driving Spaces presents the historical trajectory of the M1 Motorway through a series of cultural and political stages, each governed by a distinct set of actors, discourses, and problems. Presenting a cultural biography of its object, the book takes the reader successively through the motorway's conception, construction, consumption, regulation, and reception. Methodologically, the book seems most directly to engage with works of cultural geography, particularly with John Urry's account of automobility “as a ‘self-organizing autopoietic, non-linear system that spreads worldwide’” (6). Thus, Merriman is concerned both with the interlocking cultural and technological apparatuses that bring the motorway into being and with the phenomenology of the motorway as a multifaceted and particular geographic place. In this latter respect he is eager to counter critics who have reduced freeways in general to the status of the experientially monotonous or “placeless.” Although much narrower in geographical scope than George Charlesworth's 1984 A History of British Motorways, Merriman's Driving Spaces brings a much wider range of textual and aesthetic evidence to bear on the questions of cultural production and experience. In its emphasis on aesthetic mediations and debates, Driving Spaces mirrors other recent books on highway history, including Thomas Zeller's Driving Germany (2007) and John Jakle and Keith Sculle's Motoring: The Highway Experience in America (2008).

The chapters of Driving Spaces exhibit a certain tension between the historical and phenomenological intentions of the project. On the one hand the book follows a rough chronological narrative that begins in the early twentieth century and climaxes with the November 1959 opening of the new motorway. Accordingly, the early chapters deal with “Envisioning,” “Designing,” and “Constructing” the motorway, while the later chapters deal with “Consuming,” “Governing,” and, finally, as an epilogue, “Driving since the 1960s.” On the other hand, while these topics do produce a kind of cultural biography of the motorway, they also invoke quite different historical contingencies and contexts for the roadway as a phenomenological object. Broader historical questions continually disappear or become disrupted by a different way of framing the experience of the motorway. Following Merriman's recurring metaphor of the prism, the M1 Motorway is continually refracted into different components or cultural aspects, each of which addresses in some way the motorway as a culturally imagined object. Depending on the components involved, the shift from one chapter or section to the next sometimes seems less like the continuation of a narrative than a sudden jump to an altogether different narrative, albeit on the same nominal topic. The most noticeable of these jumps occurs between chapter 3, “Designing and Landscaping the M1,” and chapter 4, “Constructing the M1.” Here the analysis moves from a detailed account of the aesthetics of engineering and landscaping to a description of actual workers involved in construction, as their labor came to be represented in company films and newsletters and in a musical BBC program. While this account of the construction work is, in itself, a fascinating piece of labor history, one wonders why the thematic threads of aesthetics and landscaping are not pulled forward into this and later chapters. It seems, at times, that the determination to view the M1 from many possible angles of cultural experience undercuts the potential for following through on particular historical problems. It is perhaps for this reason that Merriman continually feels the need to signpost each chapter and section with preliminary summaries of the thematic sequence ahead. However, merely announcing the sequence does little to explain the thematic logic of the whole.

Probably the most significant contribution of Driving Spaces, particularly to fields such as cultural geography and landscape history, is its rethinking of the history of highways as a new type of spatial experience that was imagined virtually and vicariously before the M1 Motorway even came into being. Being built only in 1959, the M1 Motorway plunged Britain, somewhat belatedly, into the cultures, spaces, and experiences of the freeway. As Merriman demonstrates, however, British landscape architects such as Brenda Colvin and Geoffrey Jellicoe were already conceptualizing an experiential aesthetics for the high-speed highway that would also be specific to the English landscape as early as the 1930s. Thus, aesthetic issues of highs speeds, expanded visual scales, and sequential views that one normally associates with architectural writers of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Reyner Banham, Kevin Lynch, and Robert Venturi, actually seem to have a much longer pedigree. Once the motorway was actually built and experienced, as Merriman recounts, new and unpredicted layers of experience emerged in the various acts of driving on the motorway and using the service areas. Oddly, the striking architectural aesthetics of these service areas does not receive much discussion. Such omissions aside, the book's greatest strength lies in its historicizing of experience, particularly the drivers’ experience, of the M1 as an emergent modern space. It is an experience that, necessarily, must be approached indirectly through the various attempts to mediate, control, or represent that experience. While the experiences of particular drivers remain unknowable or irreducibly complex, one nevertheless comes to know through Merriman's account some of its representational lenses and aesthetic codes.