What a Well-Kept Verge Says About a Town

You can often get a first impression of a town whilst travelling down the approach road to the high street. It’s the grass on the verge that can say so much about a town and its inhabitants.

This is not a new thing to maintain the grass on the roadside of a large road. The Roman road builders maintained the verges on the Roman roads for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons were very practical such as creating good visibility around corners and allowing water to drain off the road. Others were more political in nature, such as demonstrating that the area was under administration. The verge gave a message to travellers on the road of a territory that was being governed and where people were paying attention. This message would have been apparent to people travelling on the road by cart for example.

Municipalities in Victorian times were keen to reproduce parkland in urban situations but it was the margin of road that signalled more quickly to the traveller a town with civic pretension. The verge of the road was kept as grass, neatly mown, with no litter or weeds. The town with well-kept verges, with good gas lighting and decent libraries, was the town with a sense of civic ambition. Even competing councils did not publicly declare such things but the verges and other outward marks of civic life would soon reveal the true nature of the town. The verge of the road became a class indicator, a comment on the community as a whole rather than individual households.

By the 1970s, however, a single well-cut verge became a rare sight on the approaches to towns and, when it did appear, served to signal to passers-by that some part of the local authority’s budget had been maintained. Soon, though, grass margins of all lengths were to become a thing of the past as the budgets of local authorities were slashed and the first item to be stopped was the maintenance of grass verges. Within a very short time, the neglected grass of road margins became a visible sign of all that had been allowed to neglect within a town.

It has become increasingly apparent how Green Spaces shared by communities are perceived by members of that community and how they can be used as indicators for the broader civic health of an area – be that positively or negatively.

Legal responsibilities for road verge maintenance sit with highways authorities rather than private landowners.

In a rural area where there are many historic market towns all very close to each other, and where visitors arrive by car, the impression that is given of an area by the Grounds Maintenance Gloucester of its roadside verges is of great significance. It can give an impression of a town that is well and properly maintained, beyond the simple tidying of a verge.