The Motorway Achievement: Building the Network v. 3

695 Pages·2008·186.269 MB·English

by  W.J. McCoubrey

THE
MOTORWAY ACHIEVEMENT
VOLUME 3
BUILDING THE NETWORK
Edited by
William James McCoubrey
BSc, CEng, FICE, FIHT, FIEI, FIAE
THE INSTITUTION
OF HIGHWAYS &
TRANSPORTATION
Institution of Civil Engineers
Published by Thomas Telford Publishing, Thomas Telford Limited, 1 Heron Quay, London E14 4JD
www.thomastelford.com
Distributors for Thomas Telford Books are
USA: ASCE Press, 1801 Alexander Bell Avenue, Reston, VA 20191-4400, USA
Australia: DA Books and Journals, 648 Whitehorse Road, Mitcham 3132, Victoria
First published 2009
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-7277-3198-2
© The Motorway Archive Trust (UK Registered Charity No 1077890) and Thomas Telford Ltd, 2009
All rights including translation reserved. Except as permitted by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the Publishing Director, Thomas Telford Ltd, 1 Heron Quay, London E14 4JD.
This book is published on the understanding that the editors are solely responsible for the statements made
and opinions expressed in it and its publication does not necessarily imply that such statements and/or
opinions are or reflect the views or opinions of the publishers. While every effort has been made to ensure
that the statements made and the opinions expressed in this publication provide a safe and accurate guide, no
liability or responsibility can be accepted in this respect by the editors or the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Latimer Trend & Company Ltd., Plymouth
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
That this book is the third in a national series bears testament to the enormous effort that has
been undertaken in identifying and establishing historic material for the archive in the design,
construction and building of the motorway network throughout the United Kingdom.
The whole process started in 1994 with the realisation that little was known and recorded
about the building of the motorway network in the UK over its 50 year period and that the "anno
domini" factor was increasingly removing the people who knew most about it. Initially it was
envisaged that there would only be sufficient material available for a single volume but with the
combined efforts of around 100 volunteers enough material has been rescued and stored in the
various public archives to require this volume and a further one (covering maintenance and
operation of the motorway system) to be published as part of the national series in addition to
Volume 1 - The British Motorway System: Visualisation, Policy and Administration, and
Volume 2 - Frontiers of Knowledge and Practice already issued.
To record the motorway achievement the UK was divided ino 10 regions comprising
Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the 6 Road Construction Unit regions of England, plus a
London region framed by the M25 corridor. Regional Co-ordinators for each of these regions
performed the miracle of setting up groups of people who had been involved with the UK
motorway network, identifying the documents, enactments, plans, photos etc., that gave the
background to the building of the network and depositing these in a secure public archive, where
the material could be made available for research by future students and historians alike.
The regional co-ordinators were Di Evans (England - Eastern); David Bayliss (England -
London); John Carrington (England - Midlands); Joe Sims (England - North Eastern); Harry
Yeadon (England - North Western); Phil Lee and later Sir Peter Baldwin and Robert Baldwin
(England - South Eastern); Fred Johnson (England - South Western); T Jackson McCormick
and W J McCoubrey (Northern Ireland); Dr Robert McWilliams with input from John Cullen
and John Dawson (Scotland); Owen Gibbs and later Brian Hawker, Ron Bridle and Howard
Stevens (Wales).
Each of the Regional Teams is acknowledged in the introduction to the regional chapters
herein and their contributions are very greatly appreciated by the Motorway Archive Trust.
Equally the contributions from The Institution of Highways and Transportation, both financially
and with services in kind was invaluable in getting the project off the ground and keeping it
progressing. Particularly Mary Lewis and David Ringrow though there have been a number of
other personnel who have contributed greatly over the last 14 years or so.
The Institution of Civil Engineers joined in at an early stage with generous support for the
publications and the services of Mike Chrimes, Head of Knowledge Transfer, and Carol Morgan,
Archivist. Similar expert services were given in the same spirit by the Transport Research
Laboratory under its Directors Garth Clark and Susan Sharland. The TRL and ICE now house
major elements of the Archive's material with the bulk being held under the custodial care of the
public record offices as listed under each regional chapter. Throughout the Chapters some 25
images have been reproduced by kind permission of the Institution of Civil Engineers Archives
and this contribution is gratefully acknowledged.
The leading financial support from charities came from the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund and
the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. From industry and commerce the lead was from Sir John
Banham and Tarmac Ltd with a long list of others to add such as: Aggregate Industries, Alfred
McAlpine, AMEC/McAlpine Joint Ventures, Amey, W. S. Atkins, Babtie Group, Balfour
Beatty, Bullen Consultants, Carillion Motorway Maintenance, Costain, Fitzpatrick, Hansen
Trust, John Mowlem Construction, Johnston Construction, Kier Group, John Laing. Laing
O'Rourke, Owen Williams Group, Shell UK, Charles Tennant, Tilbury Douglas Construction,
iii
Total Bitumen and Wrekin Construction. Sir William Francis and Howard Stevens gave
generously of their time to make many of these links.
There have been many individual contributions and donations made which are too
numerous to give adequate recognition here. Suffice it to say that if the contributions by the
individual volunteers had had to be procured it would have cost the UK Motorway Archive Trust
in excess of £5 million!
To all of these the efforts of Peter Hewitt and Len Parker merit particular mention for the
development, maintenance and operation of the www.ukmotorwayarchive.org website and
mapping by the former and the photographs and film work by the latter. All of this is gratefully
acknowledged and appreciated. The website contains a summary of the texts for each region and
the complete index of all of the material currently lodged with the Record Offices.
The Motorway Archive does not stop with this publication; it is ongoing with the future
development of the motorway network and is open to receive any further contributions and
material that might arise as a consequence of the messages within this volume. Should anyone
wish to make a further contribution of materials, recollections or images please do so by
contacting the UK Motorway Archive Trust through the offices of the Institution of Highways
and Transportation.
The image on the front cover is of the M3(NI) Cross Harbour scheme showing the
floodlighting under the Dargan (rail) and Lagan (road) bridges in Belfast by courtesy of Esler
Crawford Photography.
MA Publications Schematic
Learning
Packages
38 Topic
Papers
Volunteei effort
Fig 0.1: Motorway Archive Publications Schematic
FOREWORD
By
Professor Tony M Ridley CBE, PhD, FREng, FICE, FIHT, FCILT
For centuries our hills and dales and watercourses,
and our feet and hooves, created a network of
landward routes embracing every settlement as it
waxed or waned. In the Middle Ages the pattern of
roads was marked by fine bridges and was
sufficient for its purpose until the 1750s.
Thereafter the Industrial Revolution required
people to be in large numbers in new places doing
new sorts of work. They required large quantities
of materials to be moved over distances, often
across the seas with much brought coastwise by
collier. So the ports of London, Bristol, South
Wales, Liverpool, Belfast, Glasgow, Newcastle and
Hull grew apace. To serve coal's widespread
destinations inland, and in bulk, railways were
born. Their steam traction engendered the
organised mass transport of people over new
distances.
Then, without organisation, the bicycle brought
widely affordable personal mobility and by 1900
had raised awareness of the poor condition of the
Fig 0.2: Professor Tony Melville Ridley CBE,
roads throughout the nation. But it had also set the
PhD, FREng, FICE, FIHT, FCILT, as President
scene for personal mobility by means of the
of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 1995-96.
internal combustion engine. That engine blazed
Image from Painting by courtesy of ICE.
ahead through the next decades but with a grave
toll in accidents, creating serious professional concern to channel its obsessive speed in
safety. Hence the bipartisan decisions of policy in the 1940s to frame a national
motorway network.
How this was planned and built in the next six decades is "The Motorway
Achievement". A dedicated effort made since 1996 has seen the Motorway Archive
Trust recording that achievement for publication by Thomas Telford Ltd in a national
series of books and by Phillimore and Co Ltd in a regional series, extended to Northern
Ireland and Wales by their own efforts. The main source has been the writings
commissioned or gathered by the Trust.
Three volumes in the national series are subtitled respectively "Visualisation,
Policy and Administration", "The Frontiers of Knowledge and Practice" and "UK
Motorway Management: The first fifty years". This volume, "Building the Network",
adds the dimension of the work done on the ground.
Its significance is enormous for the 60 million people living in the United
Kingdom. The length of the motorway network is much less than 1 per cent of the
UK's road system but it carries in a year nearly a fifth of the vehicle miles of cars, a
third of single chassis freight vehicle miles and half of articulated lorry miles. This is
the essence of the UK's internal delivery operation. It enriches the regions'
opportunities in land use. But it is even more important as the main landward channel
of the UK's international trade by sea and air. It suits exactly carriage by container and
by ro-ro which have revolutionised operation of the ports with huge gains in efficiency
and economy.
The era of construction, through the seventeen years that produced the first
thousand miles following the launch of the building effort in 1956 by the then Minister
of Transport and Civil Aviation, Harold (later Lord) Watkinson, and then through the
thirty years required for the second thousand miles, has been an era of oil fuel,
consequent pollution and gathering congestion. Nothing in those features is to be
blamed on the civil engineering feat of creating this durable infrastructure. The
prospect, already evident in Iceland and Norway, is of portable fuel in the form of
liquid hydrogen that will not pollute; but also of congestion that will intensify as the
vehicle fleet grows towards saturation, probably in the middle of this century. That,
however, will be a situation in which there will be new appreciation of the motorway
structures when they are found to be versatile foundations for developing technologies
to contain the traffic in effectual flows.
As a former President of ICE, I was delighted to celebrate the 200th anniversary in
2006 of the birth of Isambard Kingdom Brunei, and his association with the railway era
and many other achievements in mechanical and civil engineering. It is a joy therefore
to celebrate the 250th anniversary in 2007 as I write, of Thomas Telford, his illustrious
predecessor and our first President, with no less than 1,900 km of new or improved
roads to his name and more than 1,100 bridges, as well as many other infrastructure
projects.
In 2008 we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Britain's first stretch of motorway. It
is fitting that this volume should recognise the work of Telford's successors and the
motorways they have bequeathed to posterity, much less applauded than the railways
but of comparable value to the wealth of the nation and the well-being of its citizens,
by means of the safest and most heavily loaded of all our types of road. I say this with
personal and professional admiration for the devotion and professional skill of the
people who carried forward the policy of successive Administrations to create a
motorway network for the United Kingdom.
TONY RIDLEY
November 2007
Fig 0.3: One way to
grasp the scale of
Bridges Built by Year
achievement in
building motorways
is to analyse the
modern heritage of
;oo -
the highway bridges
S 700
by their date of EQ
construction. The 8 600
TRL Research 500-
Review 1999 did this
400-
for the period 1930-
2000, revealing the 300-
large numbers built 200-
during five decades
100-
of motorway
. n I n I n _ _
construction.
1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000
Year
• Insitu RC • Pre Tensioned I Post Tensioned D Steel Composite
vi
LIST OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Ill
FOREWORD V
SUMMARY LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XXIV
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1: ENGLAND - EASTERN 3
INTRODUCTION 4
Catalogue System 4
AUTHOR'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5
EASTERN REGION 6
The Archive: Collection, Format, Storage and Access 6
Characteristics of the Eastern Region 7
Geology 8
Organisation of the Eastern Regional Office (Transport) 9
Primary Route Network in the Eastern Region 10
Ml LONDON - YORKSHIRE MOTORWAY, M10 AND M45 12
Ml Berrygrove to Crick 12
Southward extensions 14
M1/M45 THE LONDON - BIRMINGHAM MOTORWAY: LUTON TO CRICK TO
DUNCHURCH 15
A personal recollection by R H (Robin) Soper 15
Survey and Design 15
General description 17
Tender Period 18
Site arrangements 18
The start of construction 20
Earthworks 20
Surfacing 22
Structures 24
Finishings and ancillary details 26
A(1)M, PART OF THE Al STRATEGIC NORTH - SOUTH LINK 28
East Coast Motorway Feasibility Study 30
vii
M4 SLOUGH-MAIDENHEAD BYPASS, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE SECTION BETWEEN
JUNCTIONS 5 AND 7 30
Mil LONDON-CAMBRIDGE MOTORWAY 31
A12 HACKNEY TO Mil LINK ROAD 33
Background 33
The Route 34
Contract Information 35
A12 Link Road History 35
A406 NORTH CIRCULAR ROAD (FORMERLY M15) SOUTH WOODFORDTO BARKING
RELIEF ROAD 36
Historical Background 36
A14 BETWEEN THE Ml JUNCTION 19 WITH THE M6 (NORTH-EAST OF RUGBY) AND
FELIXSTOWE 37
Background 37
The A14 Link Road between the M1/M6 Junction and Huntingdon 38
The previous A604 between Huntingdon and Cambridge 39
The corridor of the previous A45 between Cambridge and Ipswich 39
Ipswich Bypass 39
South western section 40
South eastern section 43
A14-The future? 43
Contract details: 44
M25 LONDON ORBITAL MOTORWAY, NORTHERN SECTION 45
Holmesdale and Bell Common Tunnels 47
Cricket on top of the M25 49
House removal and M25 Summary Report 49
M40 LONDON-OXFORD-BIRMINGHAM MOTORWAY, LENGTH IN
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE AND OXFORDSHIRE 50
The Gerrards Cross Bypass (Jl to J2) 50
Earthworks - Pre-contract 51
Side road strengthening 52
Topographical surveys 52
Soil surveys 52
Contract documents 53
Drainage 53
Earthworks-In Contract 53
Carriageways 53
Side roads 54
Lighting 54
Services 54
Bridgeworks 54
Overbridges 54
Four-span overbridges (Hedgerley Lane, Fulmer Road Hawkswood Lane, Hollybush
Lane) 55
Two-span overbridge (Hyde Farm) 55
Underbridges (Windsor Road Denham Roundabout West, Denham Roundabout
East) 55
Footbridges 56
Box underpasses (Denham Service Culvert, Fulmer Place, Mount Hill) 56
Retaining walls 56
nu
Contract details 56
A41(M) WATFORD - TRING MOTORWAY 57
POSTSCRIPT 58
REFERENCES 59
APPENDIX 1.1: REGIONAL CO-ORDINATING TEAM 60
Team Leader 60
Team Members 60
APPENDIX 1.2: ARCHIVE CONTRIBUTORS 61
Contributors 61
APPENDIX 1.3: NEWSLETTER FROM DIRECTOR (TRANSPORT) TO STAFF IN
EASTERN REGIONAL OFFICE (TRANSPORT) 62
CHAPTER 2: ENGLAND - LONDON 65
LONDONS' MOTORWAYS - THE M25 66
PROLOGUE 66
Background 66
The Origins 73
The Highways Development Survey 1937 74
The Greater London Plan 1944 77
The London Traffic Survey and the Greater London Development Plan 78
The Birth of the M25 as such 81
EPILOGUE 82
REFERENCES-LONDON REGION 83
CHAPTER 3: ENGLAND - MIDLANDS 85
THE MIDLANDS 86
Introduction 86
Ml CRICK TO THURCROFT & M18 THURCROFT TO DONCASTER BYPASS 91
General Description 91
Mineworkings 91
Pavements 92
Structures 93
Construction 94
Additional Features 94
Basic Information 94
M5/M50 IN WORCESTERSHIRE & HEREFORDSHIRE 95
M5 STRENSHAM TO LYDIATE ASH 97
Land Acquisition 97
Site Clearance 98
ix
Drainage 98
Statutory Undertakers 99
Earthworks 99
Sub base 100
Base 100
Bridges 101
Scheme Details 101
M5 WIDENING IN WORCESTERSHIRE 102
Introduction 102
M5 Quinton (J3) to Lydiate Ash (J4) - the first widening 104
M5 Lydiate Ash (J4) to Catshill (J4A) 104
M5 Catshill (J4A) to Rashwood (J5) 105
M5 Rashwood (J5) to Warndon (J6) 106
M5 Warndon (J6) to Strensham (J8) 107
Scheme Details (M5 Widening) 110
M50 ROSS SPUR MOTORWAY & ROSS BYPASS Ill
Introduction Ill
History and background Ill
Contract 1 112
Contract 2 113
Contract3 114
Contract 4 114
M50 Brockeridge Common to Strensham Contract 114
Conclusions 115
Scheme Details 115
M6 BIRMINGHAM - PRESTON MOTORWAY (A449 DUNSTON TO CHESHIRE
BOUNDARY) 116
History and Background 116
Route Location and Design 116
Construction 117
Scheme Details 118
MIDLAND LINKS MOTORWAYS: M5/M6 119
General Description 119
Design 120
Structures 120
Junctions 121
Rural Lengths 121
Construction 121
Additional Features 122
Box Girders 122
Post Construction Problems 122
Conclusions 123
Basic Information 123
M42 BIRMINGHAM - NOTTINGHAM MOTORWAY, M5 TO CURDWORTH 124
Introduction 124
History and Background 124
Statutory Procedures 124
Route Location and Engineering Design 125
Construction 126
Conclusion 129
Scheme Details 129