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The Hyde Park Toll Gate, London. Start of the Bath Road turnpike.

Turnpike trusts were bodies set up in eighteenth century Britain to maintain principal roads and pay for this service by the extraction of tolls from users.

Up until the seventeenth century the maintenance of roads was the responsibility of individual parishes, a system which resulted in neglect and a piecemeal approach. The state of the roads was a continuing national problem made worse by increasing use made by heavy carts and carriages as trade increased.

Around 1650 a group of businessmen near Cambridge had the idea of extracting a toll from road users and using this to maintain a road and to pay interest on money borrowed to do so. The first Act of Parliament to establish such a system applied to a section of the Roman Ermine Street from Wadesmill, Hertfordshire to Stilton in 1663.^[1] This and other early schemes were managed by the Justices in Quarter Sessions

The first scheme set up as a turnpike trust was established by Parliament through a Turnpike Act in 1707, placing a section of the London-Coventry-Chester road in the hands of a group of trustees. This initiated a boom in turnpike creation along the principal routes of Britain. Each trust required a separate act of Parliament to establish it. The turnpike trusts were initially set up along the thirteen main roads from London, a process that lasted until 1750. From 1751 until 1772 there was a flurry of interest in turnpike trusts and a further 390 were established. By 1825 over 1,000 trusts controlled 25,000 miles of road in England and Wales. Each trust had a fixed life (usually 21 years) after which it had to renew its permission to manage the road. Only the busiest and most important roads were ever turnpiked, 80% of Britain’s roads were left untouched.

The trustees could erect gates as they saw fit, demand statute labour or a cash equivalent, and appoint surveyors and collectors, in return they repaired the road and put up mileposts. Sometimes, they were empowered to build completely new roads. Initially trusts were established for limited periods of twenty one years. The expectation was that the trust would borrow the money to repair the road and would repay that debt over time with the road then reverting to the highway authorities. In reality, the initial debt was rarely paid off, and the trusts were renewed as needed until the mid 19th century.

It is sometimes suggested that turnpike trusts were profit-making enterprises for the benefit of private persons. This is not so: the trustees' only power to raise capital to build or repair a road was by borrowing it on loan on the security of the tolls payable.

The rise of railways in the 19th century put an end to turnpike road building. The Local Government Act 1888 gave responsibillity for maintaining roads to county councils and county borough councils.

The name originated from the military practise of placing a pikestaff across a road to block and control passage, this would be "turned" to one side to allow travellers through. The term bar was also used. Turnpike was originally the barrier used to extract tolls, but came to mean the road itself.

• W. Albert, The Turnpike Road System in England 1663-1840 (1972)
• E. Pawson, Transport and Economy: the turnpike roads of eighteenth century England (1977)
• P. Windybottom, The Turnpike System in Britain (1972)
• B.I.G Dicley, Turnpikes for justice (2005)