HS2 and Napoleonic Road Planning
"Napoleonic" is used a little loosely here, as what's about to be described really started in Royalist France. Just as many policy trends and objectives from Czarist Russia which continued through the communist and kleptocracy eras and are still being pursued today under Mr Putin's autocracy, so it was in France. For all the revolution's determination to completely overturn the basis of society and of all intellectual thought, certain thought patterns were so deeply entrenched that the revolutionaries couldn't even perceive that they were thinking the same way as the king whose head they had just chopped off. Power was held in Paris or very nearby, and power radiated out from there like the spokes on a cartwheel. As decades of futile war against England produced a desire for military roads to enable armies to march around France, swiftly and efficiently, roads were duly built, and as far as was geographically possible, these were built radiating outwards from...