Turnpikes and Coaching Towns: England's Turnpike Trusts, Their Surviving Milestones and the Growth of Towns

Between 1663 and the 1830s, turnpike trusts took over the main roads of England and Wales, financing repairs from tolls. I combine three open sources. First, from Wikipedia's eight regional lists I build a gazetteer of 1,245 English turnpike trusts, 1,119 with the year of their first act, and place the towns named in their titles. Trust formation peaked in the 1750s (254 new trusts) and 1760s (189); 44% of dated trusts were founded in 1750 to 1772 and 74% by 1800. Timing varied little with distance from London (Spearman 0.14). Second, I combine Wikidata and OpenStreetMap records of 10,927 surviving milestones, mileposts, guide stones and toll houses in the UK. 51% stand within 50 m of a modern A-road; their recorded density varies twentyfold between English counties, and they are more common near towns named in trusts (75% of such towns have one within 2 km, against 55% of other towns). Third, for 345 places with census series I test whether turnpike places grew faster. Places named in a trust by 1800 grew faster in 1801 to 1831 in raw terms, but after allowing for initial size and region the difference is 0.10 percentage points a year (95% interval -0.13 to 0.34); a surviving milestone within 1 km shows no association. There is weak evidence that named places lost ground in 1831 to 1851, as railways spread. Turnpikes reached nearly every town quickly; on this evidence they did not by themselves sort winners from losers.

The trust gazetteer is derived from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); the tables of milestones and toll houses contain OpenStreetMap data (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0) and Wikidata (CC0).

Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/turnpike-towns/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/turnpike-towns. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/turnpike-towns/.