In and out of a sixties New Town
Basingstoke is one of the UK's sixties New Towns - whole new urban areas planned and built back when we thought the car was king. That means it has a network of urban roads that are unlike anything in most UK towns, including one right through, and under, the town centre.
Back on 4 January 2008 we took a spin around the town to see its expressway ring road, Ringway, and to pass through the middle on Churchill Way. This looping journey starts and ends at Black Dam Roundabout in the south east of town. In the years since then the town hasn't changed hugely but its roads do look different - how many differences can you spot?
Map extract from OS Opendata 1:250,000 Scale Colour Raster under the Open Government Licence 3.0.
What's new
The monster seen from below
What might it have been like to stand in one spot and witness the arrival, and the uncertainty, of plans for an urban motorway in West London?
The road that made no sense
It was the UK's only single-carriageway motorway, and twenty years ago it ceased to exist. This is the story of the strange fascination it held, and of my place in history.
The forever bottleneck, part 2
The second part of the story, where we learn why exactly the M4 gets narrower on the final approach to Europe’s biggest city.
Have you seen...
M4 Chiswick-Langley
An early triumph of the motorway programme, the M4 between Chiswick and Langley linked Central London to Heathrow - then still known as London Airport - and was the start of a new motorway west.
