Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Engineering, Transport, Government

    Opening with two lines of poetry praising the road-making skills of George Wade, stresses the woefully muddy state of London's thoroughfares and hails 'with satisfaction' the road-making designs of a Scottish engineer, Mr Mitchell, whom it proposes should be invited to 'deliver us from our slough of Parochial despond'. Notes from an extract in the Inverness Courier that Mitchell plans to construct roads from 'a composition of broken stones, Roman and Portland cement, and sand' which he thinks will make the road fit for traffic and impervious to heat and wet for 'twenty-four hours'.