On December 5, 1958, a sharp, sunlit Friday, Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, stood on a platform in front of a pair of stout microphones and declared his country’s first motorway open – all 8.26 miles of it, newly laid in four pristine lanes of asphalt around Preston, Lancashire.

From this historic moment, a driver easing on to the road off the roundabout at Bamber Bridge, in, say, a new split-screen Morris Minor saloon (top speed as advertised, 64mph), was less than nine minutes of potentially brake-free, pedal-to-the-metal motoring from Broughton. He was also, at least in theory, transported into some new kind of motorist’s paradise – a magical highway relieved of obstacles such as pedestrians, cyclists, riders on horseback and learner drivers, free of all cross-traffic, stops and twists, a place for uninterrupted motion on gentle curves and smooth surfaces, an environment flatteringly tailored exclusively to his needs and desires.

In exchange for his place in this nirvana, he would be required to learn a new, specially commissioned sign language – the work of Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, who had previously designed signs for Gatwick airport and who developed, for the motorway, a new typeface, based on the potentially unhelpful-sounding Akzidenz- Grotesk and later renamed Transport. Designed to be legible from 600 feet, the blue hoardings seemed to early motorway users almost comically enormous.

The driver had also to acquaint himself with virgin concepts, such as the “central reservation” and the “hard shoulder”. Though, as it happened, the shoulder was not hard enough, in this prototype case, and in the early months of the first motorway’s necessarily experimental life, jacks inserted beneath cars and lorries would sink into the insufficiently substantial surface, leaving the stricken vehicle unhappily on the ground.

Still, this was a learning process. Harold Watkinson, the Conservative Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation, had referred to the Preston bypass as a “guinea pig” – and, indeed, a proposal to commemorate this notion in the form of a roadside obelisk housing a granite guinea pig was entertained, but (the area’s grave loss) never acted upon. Nevertheless, the Preston bypass was consciously the flag bearer, the prototype for all future motorway construction in Britain (of which there would be much, beginning with the M1 the following year). There were so many visits to the site by curious representatives of engineering associations that the County Council appointed retired engineers to act as tour guides.

The project aroused drivers, too. The Government’s proposal for the road stated, with quiet, parochial pride, “It is hoped that the absence of long lengths of straight road and the variety and treatment of the bridges will prevent the boredom which is sometimes reported as occurring on foreign motorways.” In those early days, however, boredom wasn’t an issue – and not just because the tentative length of the road didn’t allow much scope for it. Chris Grimshaw, who lived locally and was 16 when the motorway opened, recalled how people “used to make detours in order to go on the motorway. It was a thrill.”

On the day of the opening, the man who would later be Grimshaw’s father-in-law, Thomas Edward Peacock, the owner of a local construction company, rose early enough in the morning to head the queue of public traffic waiting to drive on the new road – though others had already ventured on to it unofficially during its construction, trying out the surface on bikes and motorcycles, under cover of darkness. Peacock’s daughter recalls her father, on a subsequent trip, getting his 3-litre Bentley up to 120mph on the bypass. In the first months of its life, this unprecedented carriageway bore the status of a tourist attraction, a dazzling futurist monument, and, in the absence of motorway speed limits, which were not introduced until December 1965, a surrogate test track.

The formalities completed, Macmillan briefly worked the crowd at the Samlesbury interchange, singling out Anne Williams, then 12, a member of one of the many parties of local schoolchildren brought to the ceremony. The Prime Minister patted her on the head and said, “Hello, Ginger. You are part of a very important day. Remember it for ever.” Williams recalls the presence of a few people not in favour of the road, “protesting that it was a waste of money because bikes weren’t allowed to use it”. But she also remembers the presence of many others who thought it would be “handy”, and still more who were “just confused as to how it would work”.

Macmillan climbed back into his car and bore north along the unspoilt road, bound for Preston and a civic lunch, and leaving behind a granite plinth and many copies of a glossy commemorative pamphlet which referred, without exaggeration, to “the beginning of a new era of motoring in Britain”.

Four hours later, Harold Bradshaw, aged 18, became the first British motorway casualty after falling from scaffolding around the Higher Walton bridge and suffering head and face injuries and a fractured leg. Forty-seven days after that, on January 20, 1959, another emblematic date in the history of British motoring, the Preston bypass – or as it would later become known, the M6 – closed for repairs.

The M6 is now 230 miles long, part of a motorway network in Britain that covers more than 2,200 miles. Not many of those miles know much in the way of public affection or continue to awaken in the driver invigorating dreams of liberation. Few of us go out of our way to go on a motorway just for the sake of it. Among the images that M-roads most effortlessly summon up are closed lanes, cones and mangled metal (though one is, of course, statistically safer driving on a motorway than on any other kind of road).

We concede that motorways are the lifeblood of trade and communication. We admit that they have torn great chunks out of journey times, opening up the possibilities of the holiday and the weekend break. We acknowledge that they have transformed our lives. Yet the network is, for the most part, only grudgingly tolerated by us, grimly regarded as a hermetically sealed zone, a traffic-bound country within a country, running on its own time, with its own rules and customs, and with its own food. (Britain’s first motorway service station opened in 1959. At first it sold sandwiches from stalls, but it was to change for ever the history of the heated pie and the wine gum on its way to becoming a network of muster stations for business people and football fans.) The car’s bright dream of freedom has met the motorway’s grim uniformity; and what began with a humble dual carriageway in Lancashire has ended up entirely changing the motoring mentality – how we think about driving, how we think about the geography of the country, how we think about travel – and not necessarily in positive ways.

We have come to consider motorways a blight, and no motorway extension comes into being now without protest and resistance. Not so the first motorway, however. Preston needed the relief. The town was routinely wedged tight with traffic heading to and from Blackpool and the Lake District. As early as 1937, Lancashire County Council was pleading with the Minister of Transport for a north-south road through the county – “an entirely new road restricted to the use of motor traffic only”.

The precedents were all foreign. America had built its first highway in 1914 – a 40 mile-long single carriageway on Long Island. Germany had built an experimental road, with dual carriageways and a central reservation, west of Berlin in 1921. Italy began opening its autostrada network in 1925. The Nazi government inaugurated its system of autobahns in 1933. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Germany had nearly 2,000 miles of dual carriageway in use, with 1,240 more miles under construction.

As Lancashire County Surveyor and chief engineer for the project, Sir James Drake was the person charged with settling people’s minds about the first British version of this notion. He had the idea of building a model of the road to take to public meetings. It revealed, in miniature, two twin-lane carriageways, each 24ft wide, and straddled by a pair of 8ft-wide hard shoulders, and with a 32ft-wide central reservation with hedging to help mask oncoming headlights. Whether because of the convincing nature of his model or otherwise, Drake encountered no concerted protest, and no people in trees. One farmhouse and three other dwellings were affected and it was a source of pride to Drake that the land was eventually secured for the bypass without the issue of one compulsory purchase order. Work started on June 12, 1956.

Building the road was to prove more complicated than persuading local people of its value, though. Typically, and perhaps ominously, it rained almost throughout the two-year construction period. The major earthworks had to be postponed by six months, from the autumn of 1956 to the spring of 1957. The construction was also hampered slightly by postwar austerity. The drainage system for surface water – stone-filled trenches in the central reservation or beside the hard shoulder – was adapted from Second World War-era emergency airfield construction. After years of mining, Lancashire had vast deposits of burnt red shale and quarries producing limestone aggregate, so raw materials were not in short supply. Yet, in order to keep the acquisition of farming land to a minimum, the cuttings for the road were made with nearly vertical banks in some places. They collapsed on to the roadway during construction and would continue to do so when it was up and running.

Nevertheless, the road opened amid a kind of prelapsarian optimism. Macmillan’s was, of course, the last audible public speech to be made at Samlesbury. Even so, traffic was so light at first that an RAC patrolman could pull up on one side of the motorway and simply walk across the road to attend a vehicle on the other.

Moreover, the cousin of Anne Williams (the redhead singled out by the Prime Minister) could come down from Ayr one summer on his bike and, ignoring the prohibition, cycle the length of the bypass on the hard shoulder. “No one stopped him,” Williams told me, “so he went home the same way.”

But this golden, almost pastoral period for the British motorway was soon ended when the traffic swelled. An explosion in volume (from 8,000 cars a day in both directions, according to the council’s estimate shortly after its opening, to 22,000 by 1965) forced the Preston bypass up to three lanes each way after only seven years. In 1995 it was widened to four lanes each way. Indeed, it could be argued that the age of innocence on the M6 lasted little more than a month.

The year of 1959 opened bitterly cold. The average temperature for its first three weeks was the lowest for 47 years. The night of January 17-18 produced a hard frost and then an unusually fast thaw. The wet weather during the construction had left a high water table below the road’s surface, which now did its worst. The following morning “crazing of the surface” was noticed – 15 areas of it, amounting to 3,000 square yards of a motorway surface measuring 280,000 square yards. At the request of the police, Britain’s first motorway closed for resurfacing.

In Parliament on January 28, 1959, the Minister for Transport faced a blizzard of questions on “the collapse of the Preston motorway” – how a “road which cost the nation approximately £4 million collapsed within 47 days of its coming into use”. “Is the Minister aware,” an MP asked, “that the House and the country have been profoundly shocked by this occurrence?”

Harold Watkinson replied, “I can admit to disappointment, but not to dismay.” He backed Lancashire Council for its achievement “in difficult conditions”, adding, “If it ran some slight risks, I think that it was fully justified in doing so.” In any case, was it not the duty of this prototype project to make mistakes for the benefit of future motorways? Among the lessons learnt from the Preston bypass were that hedges were unsuitable for the central reservation (a safety barrier went in instead); that hard shoulders needed to be firmer (the bypass had its shoulders replaced with new, contrasting red ones in 1963) and that they needed to continue under the bridges (Preston’s didn’t); and, most critically, that three lanes, rather than two, needed to be the norm (Drake, the engineer, had lobbied for this from the beginning, but the government had declined).

Yet, somehow, that rapid transition from the snipping of the ribbon to the laying out of roadworks signs, can only look, in retrospect, emblematic. British motorways, it might have been realised right then, would never have the grandeur and aching romance of American highways. They would not become the stuff of un-ironic acclaim in song. There is almost a sense that motorways have shrunk the place, made it seem even more insular – and none more so than the M25, a road that describes a huge circuit and thereby, somehow naturally for a British road, goes nowhere. Still, there was that brief moment 50 years ago, when the future looked different and when driving seemed destined for some new and unimagined horizon.