The Historic Town of Ayr

Newmarket Street

Newmarket Street connects with the High Street and The Sandgate and is a delightful street filled with a variety of shops and also connected to Queens Court, which has a number of specialist stores.

Newmarket Street has actually a remarkable claim. It was one of the first streets in the country to be finished with Tarmac - which is ironic, because it is now finished with block paving!

Some may jump to the conclusion that the Tarmac was to do with 'the inventor of Tarmac' John Loudon McAdam, who was born in Lady Cathcart's House nearby on the Sandgate in 1756.

BUT John McAdam didn't invent Tarmacadam. What he did do was revolutionise the way roads were constructed by using angular aggregates of various sizes in layers. Two layers were made of hand-broken stones of up to three inches in size and on top of this a final layer of broken chips with a maximum size of one inch. He also constructed the road so that it was higher in the middle, so permit better drainage.

Whilst this seems remarkably simple, it was at the time revolutionary, and meant roads could be built much more cheaply and efficiently. Prior to this any really good sound road would have been built with flagstones which was horrendously expensive, or with Telford's system of large stones at the bottom, piled up with smaller stones. Although Telford had a sloped surface too, this was only on top. The base of the road at the bottom of the construction was actually flat. McAdam realised that making the base of the road sloped as well, would allow for better drainage and experimentation proved that the angular chips not only did not move around so much, but actually compacted into each other with the weight of traffic going over the road.

So successful were his first roads that 'Macadamisation' spread round the world.

Tar was later added for the first time in 1848 - McAdam died in 1836. But he had laid the basis for modern road-building.