The North Road

by Rob Cowen

‘Radical and beautiful. Haunted and haunting: Cowen tracks the London-Edinburgh highway […] A dazzlingly inventive work of literature.’ Robert Macfarlane

At the heart of this book is a highway. The A1; The Great North Road. A 400-mile multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway that has run like a backbone through Britain for the last 2,000 years.

In this genre-defying and profoundly personal book, Cowen follows this ghost road from beginning to end on a journey through history, place, people and time. Weaving his own histories and memories with the layered landscapes he moves through, this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time past and time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves.

Written in kaleidoscopic prose, The North Road is an unforgettable exploration of Britain’s great highway.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Travel, Audiobook

416 pages, Hardcover

Published April 17, 2025

Reviews

[Penelope · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like a walk along the titular road this book is sometimes a meander through deep history, a stroll through boundless imagination, a stride through a deep and tricky thought or even at times a flat out sprint from something that you can sense lurking behind you! I loved this book, even more than Common Ground, which I didn’t think was possible. It is a book that defies definition, forging its own path through publishing and confusing the shelving systems of bookshops everywhere. It is a book of landscape, sense of place, history, nature, biography and imagination, it is a book of wonder, delight and at times deep sadness. I finished this book with pages of underlining, curious thoughts in my head, stories that will haunt me and a deep respect for an author whose writing moves me in ways that so many other books never manage. I will reread this book, most likely many times and I urge anyone who is intrigued by the synopsis to pick it up, settle down and begin.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I live just three miles from the old Great North Road and a little further from its current incarnation, the A1M. For the last thirty years or so, it’s been a constant presence in my life; a route travelled two or three times most weeks. Rob Cowen also has a personal and family history with the road, both the stretch that is so familiar to me in South Yorkshire and thirty or forty miles further north, where it cuts through the Vale of Mowbray. His book, a decade in the making, traces the history of Britain’s main north - south thoroughfare from ancient times to the present, its place in the landscape, and the lives of its neighbours and travellers over time and place. It’s an ambitious undertaking and largely successful; it is endlessly revealing and surprising, richly rewarding the reader with new angles on something that is so easy to take for granted. Cowen employs a range of narrative techniques: travelogue, reportage, biography, memoir, fiction, imaginative reconstruction and historical research; a fitting approach to tell the fragmented and multifaceted story of the road.

[Bjorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The road is the place all lost things go.

Easily one of the best new books I've read in a good long while. Cowen spends 5 years walking up and down a 2,000-year-old road, tracking history from his own to his family's to the country's, casting it against Britain in the throes of Brexit and Covid. Mixing autobiography with history with essays with fiction, one of those books that gives librarians a headache. Trust me: Just buy 5 copies and put them on different shelves.

I love books that don't pick a lane. Except of course this one literally does. It does what a road does; it transcends time, and ties everything together in a constant motion.

For so long as the road continues, the future is still ours to shape.

[Peter Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. This book is different from a travel log. The writing beautifully blends together themes about travelling up the A1 (aka the Great North Road - I know that may seem dull but isn’t!), a history of the places en route, with discoveries of Rob Cowen’s family history and ancestors. It reflections of his own life and current family relationships, the impact of his parents divorce and dynamics of family and relationships . It may sound like a man having a mid life crisis or reflections on life’s big question as he find himself as a parent. But it’s all these things and more. At times it even also meanders into short fictional prose about historical characters who lived on the A1. A lovely and interesting read.

[Peter Longden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent travelogue focused on the North Road (A1 / A1M) as it meanders north from London. Giving autobiographical insights into the authors life, mixed with historical stories from ‘on the road’, this is both entertaining and a fascinating look at a significant English and Scottish landmark.

[Erik B.K.K.]

Not my cup of tea, but not badly written at all. I expected something else entirely. A beautiful book, just not for me.

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently celebrated my 50th birthday in St Albans and bought this book from one of the best bookshops I have ever been to: Books on the Hill. In fact, my favourite bookshop. When I entered the back room of the shop, there it was… Standing up with its majestic cover, gold road glinting in the afternoon light… It was meant to be that I bought this book there that day.

I had previously read the Guardian review and was left wondering about it. A book about a road? It sounded romantic but also a surprising idea. I then forgot about it as the days and weeks passed...

I had spent several days over my birthday week driving on the Great North Road around St Albans, Hertford and Hatfield. I’ve not driven that far North myself although I have travelled by train to Manchester and flown from Gatwick to Glasgow. As a student in South Wales I travelled all over to Northern universities for football games. Liverpool, Manchester and more. Years ago I travelled by coach from London to Oban for Benbecula. I only realised that week that I was driving in the Great North Road because my satnav told me so. Here is where the great and terrible events of the past have unfolded. What our island has seen. Incredible.

I absolutely loved this book and enjoyed every single page. I am a huge fan of history and nature and the mix of memories and stories was something I have never experienced reading before. I love walking with my thoughts, especially through the lanes and landscape of my forefathers. I also loved the supernatural elements which were at times like cliffhangers. Ghosts seemed to be everywhere.

It’s hard to classify this book but it brought me a lot of peace.

Thank you, Rob, for writing this book.

[Tim Rideout · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘The road is the place all lost things go’.

We all travel along on our own road, encountering the people and places that constitute the fabric of our lives, in time and memory. In ‘The North Road’ Rob Cowen explores the Great North Road’s trajectory through space and time. In doing so, Cowen engages with his own equivalent trajectory, with the familial and romantic loves and losses that constitute his own fabric. It is intensely moving.

‘The North Road’ is a dazzling achievement. Poetic and political, the history and geography of the A1 provides a celebration of the richness of Britain’s landscape and past, offering understanding and hope for the future. Not the facile promises and false nostalgia of populism, but a hope founded upon an appreciation of the past and a clear-eyed view of the present.

As Cowen states: ‘We must live fully in the realities of a complicated present and face an uncertain future together, without being beholden to what has passed down. Yet it is impossible to do so without being clear-eyed about that history and the enduring influences that continue to work so powerfully on, and through, us today’.

It is through an appreciation of narratives like ‘The North Road’ that we understand who we are and where we have been, to guide us home.

[Kim Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this walk along the North Road with Rob Cowen, the merging of its history with his personal history. I learned a lot about the past and its impact on the present.

[Vansa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice conceit of Cowen’s to follow the Great North Road, while construction is happening to expand a new motorway, and trace history and development through that. This road connecting London to Edinburgh, probably was first called “great” in the 17th Century, by engineers tasked with forming a postal system and roads for that, leading to development of mail coaches, and other ancillary infrastructure, such as coaches, that would make long journeys in stages. The old starting place of the road was Smithfield Market, that used to be where farm animals were brought to be butchered, for fresh meat ( it made me realise entire flocks must have been walking these distances, and as Cowen describes it, they would be allowed to pasture overnight on the fields of local gentry for a fee. ) Apart from meat though, condemned criminals, political prisoners who weren’t deemed worthy of an execution at the Tower of London or Tyburn, were also executed here, including William Wallace, in a public execution-a threatening display of violence and a warning to other would-be revolutionaries.
The Great North Road was used extensively by merchants, and Smithfield marked a northern limit of London, after which there wasn’t much activity till the next stage of the journey, Islington. This was where highwaymen would usually lurk, like the violent Dick Turpin, turned into a folk hero by the Victorians. The famous Angel Inn at Islington, was started in the 18th Century, and must have been a welcome sight for tired travelers, who finally made it there. It’s interesting that he also writes about an oak tree called Turpin’s oak, where he apocryphally hid, and where shots were fired by the outriders of coaches, to deter potential thieves.
Cowen interrogates the myths about the British sporting spirit and fairplay, through a fascinating boxing match that took place during the Regency, between Tom Molineaux and Tom Cribb in 1810, with Tom Molineaux being trained by Bill Richmond, a former prizefighter turned pub owner. Their stories are fascinating, with both Richmond and Molineaux being formerly enslaved Black men in America, before migrating to England. Their stories are unsettling accounts of having to put their bodies on the line for the entertainment of others ( much like modern day MMA fighters, but there wasn’t a racial element to it). Richmond came to England along with a British commander who saw him in a brawl as a teenager in New York, and then hired him to fight with soldiers to entertain his guests, and after the war, brought him over to England where was educated and took up the profession of cabinet making. He was still interested in boxing, though, and returned to it in a few years, and in around 5 years had made enough money to open a pub in London, and subsequently a well-respected boxing training academy where he trained, among others, Lord Byron ( and died when he was in his late 60s, quite amazing when average life expectancy then was around 40). Tom Molineaux’s story is not documented enough in historical records, he was also a slave who earned his freedom by winning the slaveowner several prizefights( and a lot of money from his bets), and moved to England so he could earn money from his boxing talent. Richmond met him and started training him when he visited his pub, and Molineaux got good enough to start winning some bouts, and finally challenged the champion of the day ( familiar to all of us Georgette Heyer fans), Tom Cribb. This fight wasn’t going so well for Cribb, and ended up with an enraged crowd being unwilling to accept a white man being defeated by a Black American, and they charged the ring, practically breaking Molineaux’s arm, and none of his protests were heard. The referee didn’t call off the game either, letting it proceed, with Molineaux obviously being beaten by Cribb, since not only had Cribb got a lot of time to recover, but Molineaux was also incapacitated by the crowd. He demanded a rematch that was after a few months, during which Cribb trained and Molineaux celebrated, and the rematch, was held by the side of the Great North Road, a site Cowen travels to, that would have hosted thousands of people for the rematch. MOlineaux was defeated, and as Cowen puts it, the myths of racial superiority were upheld, though those weren’t proved by fair contest but deception and punching down . This really wasn’t a demonstration of the spirit of fairplay, and Molineaux, who should have been boxing champion, died in his 40s, penurious and unhealthy.
Cowen weaves in the personal with the political, through his writings about his grandfather, who was a miner, and then proceeded to own chip shops along the Great North Road. There’s some lovely writing about his mining life, the dangers but also the solidarity and the slow chipping away at that. He goes all the way to its end at Edinburgh, and a little beyond, to see the resting place of one of his oldest ancestors, and it’s a nice way to show a continuity of human life and settlement.

[Rob Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Lyrical Cartography of Britain’s Arterial Soul

Rob Cowen’s The North Road (April 2025) is a bold, genre-defying exploration of England’s A1 highway—a 400-mile artery that has coursed through the nation’s physical and psychological landscape for two millennia. Blending memoir, nature writing, and social commentary, Cowen turns away from pastoral tradition to confront the reality of a thundering dual carriageway. In doing so, he embraces the altered, human-shaped landscapes of modern Britain, challenging conventional ideas of nature and expanding the genre’s scope to include the everyday, the industrial, and the overlooked.

This book resonates as a powerful excavation of national identity. Set against the backdrop of a Britain in flux, it reflects themes of resilience, survival, and legacy. Cowen’s journey becomes both literal and symbolic—a means of engaging with the fractured present through the lens of a road that has witnessed centuries of change.

The prose is the book’s driving force. Lyrical, daring, and emotionally sharp, Cowen’s writing transforms the mundane into the meditative. His language shifts fluidly—from poetic to stark, from hopeful to haunting—carrying the reader across physical and emotional terrain with striking clarity. He brings enchantment to the everyday, reanimating a familiar road as a space of deep reflection and discovery.

The A1 itself becomes a central presence: an evolving thread that ties together ancient paths, Roman roads, pilgrimage routes, coaching inns, and modern motorways. Cowen parallels this layered infrastructure with a narrative rich in memory, emotion, and sensory detail. His structure may seem meandering, but it mirrors the road’s own complexity and the nonlinear nature of thought, time, and landscape. Rather than adhering to a fixed path, the book flows like a journey—open-ended, reflective, and alive to digression.

The book also confronts the environmental and historical realities of this vast infrastructure. From wartime mobilisations to modern pollution, the road’s impacts—on land, air, people, and ecosystems—are explored with honesty and insight. These details deepen the book’s engagement with place, positioning the A1 as a microcosm of national change: shaped by conflict, progress, neglect, and reinvention.

By focusing on this unlikely subject, Cowen reimagines what nature writing can be. The book’s power lies in its refusal to romanticise or simplify. Instead, it celebrates the richness that can be found at the margins—in verges, lay-bys, scrubland, and service stations—and finds poetry in noise, motion, and memory.

Ultimately, The North Road is a powerful meditation on belonging in a time of constant movement and disconnection. Its structure may challenge some readers, but its emotional depth and striking prose offer a rewarding journey. It is a book that asks what it means to live here, now, in a landscape shaped by both history and modernity—and answers with beauty, rage, insight, and grace.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't find this book an easy one to read and find it more than averagely irksome to rate, insofar as that matters. I wrote a long review which disappeared into the Goodreads papier maché so here we go again... The first reason I found this a tricky book is nothing to do with the work, and a lot to do with the fallout from the Salt Path scandal. It's a book about an unsettled person going for a walk.. oi oi... and there's praise for it from you know who on the cover. And she receives a name check in the acknowledgments. You can still review a book and you can still be supportive of other writers if you are a disingenuous double-downer, or an outright grifter or whatever. But you open the book to be faced with page after page of one or two liner praise from, well, the usual suspects. Many of whom seem lovely people and who have certainly written books I've enjoyed. But it was all far far too much - maybe in 25 years time for an anniversary edition... Could we not be done with this stuff, just as much as I find those good authors who are constantly whining or sneering at other people's work very offputting?

So, although almost none of the foregoing is likely to be Rob Cowen's doing, and I've enjoyed other books of his, he had an uphill struggle to engage me and whilst I've never been so naive I can't spot a possible lacuna, I found myself bristling and snarking more than I would once have done.

What helped was the fictional passages. They jolted me out of the other narratives, each riffing on some aspect of the A1 history. In particular I was impressed with the depiction of the Harrying of the North in which a huscarl attempting to fend off William's men combined thrilling slash, bish bash bosh fighting with something majestic and heart rending, and surprised at how much it moved me.

The book skittered a bit, partly because it wasn't a completist sort of a walk. There was plenty of interesting history, especially about coaching, and about the twists and turns of his own family history. His writing about the impact of family breakup in his teens was more complicated, probably because those directly involved are still alive. Perhaps it is just an accurate portrayal of how a teenager would experience it but it is important to the narrative that we appreciate that he has been warmly parented and had a happy childhood... and then suddenly we are in endless row territory, with the siblings escaping from the atmosphere as best they can... and then one parent has gone, in the night. There's never the slightest hint at 'why'.

It seems there have been a number of other books about The Great North Road, the A1, over the centuries and perhaps it doesn't much matter that the book treats it more as a symbol than something to be described for those of us who like our nostalgia kicks.

[Ginni · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed this; I loved the first book of Rob Cowen’s that I read, ‘Common Ground’, not least because I read it soon after moving to the area where that book is based, and where the author was living at the time. So I do feel a sense of local pride about the glowing reviews of both titles; having also lived near the A1(M) for a number of years, this title seemed very relevant. Again and again, there were coincidences between the book and my own experiences and history; the importance of Doncaster, also relevant to our family for different reasons, the fact that just before reading the section on Grantham and Isaac Newton’s birthplace at Woolsthorpe Manor we had visited both, and the section on John Clare and enclosure, which I’d been discussing with family recently.
I nearly gave a five star rating to the book, but a small but annoying habit of modern writers held me back, and that was the increasing habit of writing without proper sentences. No doubt I’m an old grammar curmudgeon but this really gets on my nerves. I did however like the author’s use of many different styles of writing, including the use of fiction.

[Frank McMahon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember reading one of his previous books, Common Ground and being impressed with his immersions into local landscape and its wider connections.
His new book is partly a charged memoir of childhood trauma and family breakdown, partly a search among ancestral history and especially its links with the North Road and partly an exploration of the North Road; origins, development, loss and re-routing, history.
It is also a road which he walked, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend. You can feel the effort, discomfort and pleasure.
It is honest and vivid, informative and thought-provoking, an insight into the way he helps to build his own family, re-establish relationships.
The chapter on the Harrowing of the North is a work of high quality fiction, of empathic imagination, and veracity in its use of Anglo-Saxon.
The chapter where he travels with his mother to visit he tomb of a neo-lithic ancestor is warm and uplifting. A superb book, spiked with anger about Covid and the huge inequalties in our society..

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Rob’s style of writing which I find far more accessible than his contemporary Rob McFarlane’s where you really need to concentrate due to the more detailed prose. Common Ground is one of my favourite books so I was very much looking forward to Rob Cowen’s latest offering.
A blend of personal discovery & tracing of his families transit from Doncaster to London, his personal journey to this point woven between historical stories on and around the A1, it makes for a fascinating read. There are passages here worthy of any good novel, I was gripped by the couple escaping William’s soldiers to the safety of St Cuthbert’s monks, just as an example.
While the road is the focus it’s the history that makes the book, from pre Roman to the building of the A1M, there is so much to enjoy here.
When travelling north to visit family in the NE the road will take on a whole new meaning as I reflect on the stories in this book.
10 years in the making it’s well worth the wait.
What next Rob? I can’t wait.

[Carolyn Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ramblings and musings while rambling along the A1. There are bits that catch the interest but like a journey there are large sections that don’t. My biggest problem was the way the journey set out with great detail in the early stages then peters out. My own relationship with the road is through Northumberland so I felt truly cheated to find the chapter, “Durham to Caithness” was not a journey but a giant leap from one to the other.
Yes it’s a personal journey but having listened to the author discovering lots of facts and anecdotes through London, the great leaps through areas that don’t warrant the same interest feels very uneven.
I’m guessing the author had just had enough by Durham and wanted to wrap it up.
Overall it’s patchy, and has many changes in style and tone. At times it drew me in and then lost my interest just as fast.
Some will love it but I won’t be revisiting.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a big book, perhaps too big. But as the author's research for the book covered 10 years (on and off) I can understand how difficult it would be to edit it down any further. There were a few chapters that I would have preferred to skip but also many that caught my imagination, and I ended up with sympathy and liking for the author who leans heavily on his own life story. Growing up myself just north of London, The North was always my inspiration. Books like J. B. Priestley's The Good Companions gave it a sound of romance and mystery, and I later ended up at Edinburgh University.

[Phil Chamberlain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cowen pulls together personal histories, literary sources, nature writing, archaeological finds and the stories he uncovers tramping the Great North Road from London to Edinburgh.
It’s a labour of love with a deeply personal thread but Cowen finds some universal truths on his journey.
An engrossing read.

[Dr Melanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was so disappointed by this book. So disjointed. I wanted more descriptions of the road and the towns/villages alongside. I did not enjoy the ruminations of the author and the insubstantial tales of his family. A lot of self indulgent ramblings

[Graeme Whitton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me. I'm sure it's nicely written but I just got frustrated with it. Seemed more of a therapy session about the authors troubled past than anything else. Poor.

[Mrs F S Petersen]

7

[Damien Handslip · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book feels like hard work to read but worth it. Part road trip, part autobiography, part cultural history.
worth reading for anyone living near the (Great) North Road.