To read this story of ‘how the car conquered our hearts and conquered our cities’ is to feel invited – to reflect, as its author Graeme Davison does in his introduction, on one’s own relationship with the automobile. And it requires immediate admission: mine is minimal. I do not, cannot, and probably never will drive a car. I am noted among friends for a casual attitude to such niceties as locking doors. Only with difficulty have I mastered the operation of a petrol bowser.

Yet while I have tended to view life, indolently and opportunistically, from the passenger seat, I have also felt the full repercussions of the automotive age. My brother died in a car accident; so, three years ago, did one of my closest friends; when I was a child, my mother’s Hillman Imp was monstered by a bus, and she escaped luckily with her life. I can, then, in my own way, grimly corroborate Davison’s view that our ‘most valued tool and most powerful status symbol’ has impacted greatly and gravely on the urban landscape. Even a refusenik like myself has had his life reshaped and rerouted by automobilism; to live in a conurbation of any sort during the last century, in fact, is to have been implicated in the car’s evolution from novelty to necessity.