UK Roads: Oxford Inner Ring Road

Only the south-west sector of this road ever got built. Looking at it from west to east, it's currently Hollybush Row, Oxpens Road, Thames Street (eastbound)/Speedwell Street (westbound). Traffic then has to go back via St Aldates and High Street to cross Magdalen Bridge for all points east of the city centre. However, it was planned in the 1960s that a new road be constructed across Christ Church Meadow to join up with Iffley Road (A4158), Cowley Road (B480), and St Clements (A420) at an improved junction. The University, quite understandably, objected and it never happened.

The proposed scheme was curiously similar to The Fen Causeway (A1134/A603) in Cambridge. Both were planned as new relief roads in mediaeval university towns, cutting across green meadows thus allowing traffic to bypass the south of the city centres. The only difference is that The Fen Causeway was actually built, in the 1930s, and one surmises that it happened because it was decades before the tide started to turn against car-obsessed city planners.

The above is taken from notes on a plate in The Motorway Age: Road and Traffic Policies in Post-War Britain by David Starkie, published by Pergamon Press, 1982.

Paul Berry, 1st Jun 04