Fascinating thread. Thanks to everyone who contributed. Its a subject in which I am very interested too as my own father worked for many years in England in the sixties for Wimpey and John Laing. I remember spending a summer in Cumberland in a little place called Tebay in a house with no running water or electricity that my Dad had rented. He was working on a motorway. I'm not sure now which motorway I was very young at the time.