Schemes that happened (highlighted) and schemes that didn’t happen, plus the usual afterthought about public transport. Back then, of course, there was no need to pay lip service to “active travel” in such documents. And it’s delightfully concise and matter-of-fact, really, compared with today’s equivalents which are all aspiration and no intention.
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Dorset turnpike trusts
We interrupt normal service for something pre-20th century…
Pedestrians at bay
Well this one amused me. Council build big new urban road, take no account of pedestrians in designing it. But pedestrians want to continue walking to where they want to go, so do. Arms race of anti-pedestrian defences ensues.
It must be from somewhere around 1988-90ish.
Tunnel vision: a Corfe Castle Bypass, 1984
From 1984, a consultation on alternative options for a Corfe Castle Bypass. Five routes that would create catastrophic destruction to this chocolate box village (two of them blocking the subsequent extension of the heritage railway which is such an important part of the village’s tourism economy today) and/or drive massive scars through the chalk hills, leading to the obvious choice for local consultees: a prohibitively expensive tunnel. Which will be why a bypass on this dead-end road to Swanage always remained on the shelf.
Can you work out what Dorset Engineering Consultancy’s priorities were?
They did noise and air quality surveys and advised on safety at sports grounds, but I wonder what they really wished they could be doing all day… Motorway envy much?
The picture is of the A31/A338 Ashley Heath junction outside Bournemouth, an illustration that was apparently used to promote the project and the council, rather than the scare people off.
More on that junction later.
Weymouth Town Centre Relief Road, 1987
What’s this all about then?
I’ve found myself in possession of piles of documents, diagrams, maps, photographs, newspaper clippings and letters that add up to something of a resource on some of the history of Dorset roads. It’s all of extremely niche interest, and really it all needs to go in the recycling. But there are bits that are useful in there, and since some of it is unique, most of it would be very difficult to get hold of if you wanted it, and almost none of it is otherwise online, I figured it could be worth digitising before destroying.
The main reason is that, while some of it might be nothing more than a delightful bit of the past for a small population of local readers, other bits might be important in the future in ways that can not exactly be predicted. Because the pattern of the past 80 years is that every couple of decades, central government forgets how destructive, counter-productive, and deeply unpopular big new motor roads are and decides afresh that road building is the future. After pushing through a few schemes — Newbury, Twyford Down and the M11 Link in the last big round of the early 1990s — they spot the mistake and/or get booted out. But not before some of the irreversible damage is done. From the mid-1990s on, as the weight of a more sophisticated generation of transport research created the new realism in politics, it felt like the lesson had been learned and we no longer had to worry about that sort of thing. And yet George Osborne has decided to repeat the past again, starting with the Hastings Combe Haven road.
The Weymouth Relief Road shows that zombie road schemes — killed a dozen times before as bad investments, delivering destruction but little value — can be resurrected decades after they were declared dead. Who knows when a shift in council or government might allow a scheme like the Melbury Abbas bypass to rise from the grave and rampage across the Dorset hills again?
So I doubt that this is a blog you’ll want to follow. I might add the occasional comment to posts, but it’ll mostly be OCRd documents posted simply to make them available somewhere they’ll be visible to Google if and when they might one day be needed.
Highways and byways in Dorset 