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 