Bypass: The Battle Rages On (17 December 1976)

Little Brickhill is on the warpath again.  And yes, it’s about the Watling Street and how once more the growth of traffic is not only threatening to isolate one side of the village from the other but is also threatening the very lives of the people.

The people say that in 12 months the amount of traffic has increased by one-third to 8,000 vehicles in 12 hours and that the only real solution is a bypass.

The story is 30 years old to my knowledge and probably a good deal older than that.

I well remember how between the end of the war and the opening of the M1 the amount of traffic passing through Little Brickhill – and also through Fenny Stratford, Loughton and Stony Stratford – by day and by night was well nigh intolerable.

The traffic lights at Fenny and Stony ameliorated the dangers there, but played havoc with local nerves during the night as vehicles squealed and shuddered to a halt and then revved up again.

The only place to get any relief during that period was Loughton, where a bypass was built.  The old route which went down by the Fountain, can be plainly seen.  But I don’t think the bypass was provided as much for the benefit of the inhabitants as for the traffic, which often bottle-necked down there.

Little Brickhill already had a “30” limit but the only extra it received during that period was the pedestrian crossing.  This was (and is) near the bottom of the village, so that if you were near the top and wanted to get safely to the opposite place you had to walk down to the bottom, over the crossing, and up the other side.  I believe the churchyard was also trimmed down at that time.

“Have patience.  You will be all right when the motorway opens,” the denizens of all these places were told.

And so it turned out.  For quite a number of years after the M1 had got as far north as Crick, there was a remarkable hush, especially at night-time.  Eventually, the speed limit at Brickhill was raised to “40.”

In those days the County Court was held at Bletchley.  Judge A M Hamilton used to motor down from his home at Rugby.  He was half-an-hour earlier than usual in arriving for the first court held after the M1 opening.  “Driving down the Watling Street has been like driving down a country lane this morning,” he beamed, though I don’t know that it made any difference to his subsequent judgments.

The question next arose of what to do about the Watling Street.  Before the war, bypasses for Fenny and Stony – and maybe also for Little Brickhill – had been mooted, but these were now shelved.

However, I recall that even in those days, some officials said they fully expected that in due course, and irrespective of the M1, the Watling Street would again become as busy as ever.  It seems to me that the due course may be arriving fast – and with the traffic including a menace it did not have before in the shape of multi-ton juggernauts.

To meet the exigencies of the new city, Stony has now been by-passed.  There is also the plan to divert the whole of the A5 from there to the Galley Lane crossroads.  This I think is a mistake, in that it does not go far enough, nearly everything that rolls along there will have rolled through Little Brickhill before reaching Galley Lane or will do so if travelling in the opposite direction.  Ergo, if there is a good case for diversion there is a good case for beginning and ending it to the south of Little Brickhill.

Little Brickhill and its main road present a problem for myself, as an amateur historian of sorts.  There is little doubt that the road was there before the village.  In this respect a recent Gazette headline amused me by referring to the Watling Street as scarring the face of Little Brickhill when it might have been more truly said the Little Brickhill scars the face of the Watling Street.

When the local parish boundaries were drawn up in Saxon times the Watling Street was used as the ready-made rough north-south boundary.  The parishes faced each other across it – as Passenham – Stony Stratford, Shenley-Loughton, ancient Bletchley-Simpson, etc.

How comes it then that – as far as I can make out from my much–worn Ordnance Survey map – most of Little Brickhill straddles the Watling Street?  At various times the road has taken other routes, both north and south of the village, but none of the known ones seems to account for the parish boundary.

So was the parish carved from two that originally faced each other at the Watling Street?  Or is the village so old that it was substantially there, complete with its burial ground, but not yet with its church, before all the other boundaries were drawn up, thus making this idiosyncracy unavoidable?

The question is almost entirely academic, of course.  Besides which, I might have completely misread the map.  There is also the further complication that the civil boundary might not accord with the older ecclesiastical boundary.  But I do like things to be tidy, even if my desk never was!