Oxfordshire, 1961. About a dozen suited and flat-capped volunteer airmen sit on folding chairs on a tiered platform in the middle of Benson airfield. As they watch, a small car drives down the runway towards them, a large road sign affixed to its roof. They take notes. The sign is changed. The car makes the journey again. These RAF men were drafted by the Road Research Laboratory to help resolve a debate that had taken up several inches of column space in both national newspapers and industry rags: what should the signs look like on the new British motorways?

UK car ownership boomed in the 1950s and the roads were not built to handle the volume of traffic. Motorways were soon constructed, but the existing road signage – a hodgepodge of different typefaces, symbols and colours – was completely inadequate for high-speed travel. A government committee was formed and the typographer Jock Kinneir, who had recently designed signage for the new Gatwick Airport, and his assistant and former pupil Margaret Calvert were appointed to take charge of the appearance of Britain’s motorway signs. 

Calvert, the subject of this handsome new volume, remembers that the committee wanted her and Kinneir to use the same typeface that appeared on Germany’s signs. It was a ‘request which we chose to ignore,’ she writes, ‘believing that the German sans serif … would not sit well in the