Miscellany: Cross town traffic
16 February 2009
16 February 2009
I've tried to understand, in the context of the times, how anyone could think the proposed new inner ring road was a good plan. It seems to have come mainly from sheer desperation at the amount of traffic in the historic core of York.
I don't envy the people who had to make the decisions about the ring road in the 1970s. The issue dragged on for years, tediously. The cuttings I have describe long-winded council meetings and the public enquiry that eventually led to the scheme being abandoned.
The ring road was approved by a majority of local councillors at the time, including Douglas Craig, well-known to locals in more recent years as a rather controversial figure, as a former Chairman of York City Football Club. Mr Craig, Chairman of the City Council's Traffic Committee in the early 1970s, had sympathy for those whose property was in the direct line of the proposed road. But he didn't have much time for the growing group of protestors against it, who were, he thought, "mainly led by people from or on the fringe of the university who are usually described, loosely but never in my opinion accurately, as intellectuals." (Yorkshire Evening Press, 26 Oct 1971)
It went on for the first half of the 1970s, the wrangling and planning and replanning. There were purple routes and red routes and a whole load of routes proposed. Most of those in positions of authority seemed to be working on the assumption that the new inner ring road was a given - the only way to keep traffic from the historic city centre - and that there would have to be some sacrifice of some important buildings outside the walls in order to save the buildings within.
It didn't end when the public enquiry verdict came. For many years councillors debated whether to protect the proposed line of the ring road. The YEP reported a meeting in August 1975. "Then came an emotional speech from Coun. Mrs Betty Doig who, thumping the wooden benches to emphasise her point, slated the county council for "mishandling and mismanaging" the situation. She declared herself absolutely and thoroughly sick of it." (YEP 5 Aug 1975)
I appreciate how Mrs Doig felt, and I've only read a few of the reports of the apparently endless council meetings.
It seems important to pause, remember the 70s, and to thank those who worked so hard to fight the ring road plans. Some of them being those pesky intellectuals mentioned earlier. I sometimes remember their efforts, when walking along Bootham past Bootham Park Hospital grounds, the lawns and the lines of the houses and the railway and the fine old trees that wouldn't be there if the ring road plans had succeeded.
People complain about Stonebow House, as a mid-20th century blot on the landscape.
Perhaps instead we should look at it and feel relieved that York was relatively unscathed by the madly exuberant post-war modernising, and that the city has, if you like, only a concrete earring or two, rather than a whole concrete and tarmac necklace.
People in Protest (Ed. David Cummin, York 2000), (York, 1974) - available in local libraries
