Confessing Evangelical

Went to Southampton on Saturday to a friend's wedding. A lovely day, but it did involve driving along one of the most depressing stretches of road in the country: the M3 through Twyford Down. This was a controversial road scheme that led to a lot of protests when it was built about ten years ago, as it involved cutting a motorway straight through downland that was both an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a Site of Special Scientific Importance. Calls to build a tunnel instead were ignored.

What gets me is not only that they built a motorway through Twyford Down, but that they built a motorway of such heartstopping brutality and ugliness:


A strong contender for the ugliest stretch of road in England, if not the world. It's almost enough to make you think they did it deliberately, as a spiteful two-fingered salute both to the English countryside and to those who opposed the scheme. (Notice how I've unconsciously slipped into blaming the mysterious "they"...).

But while looking for pictures of this abomination, I found an interesting alternative view from the website of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Cambridge University. This points out that, while "there is no denying that a civilised society would have built a tunnel", the development as a whole became a model of effective planning gain, that should ensure that future road developments are less ruinous that Twyford Down.

The plus side to the Twyford Down development was that, as the bulldozers moved in on the Down to build the M3, on the other side of the hill the old A33 Winchester bypass was being restored to a natural environment no less valuable and beautiful than Twyford Down. The article quotes a piece from New Scientist in which the environmentalist Fred Pearce writes:

It is a classic image of England. Take a walk out of medieval Winchester, past the cathedral and over the water meadows, where John Keats wrote his ode To Autumn, and on up the chalk downland to the top of St Catherine’s Hill, site of an ancient hill fort. Only from the top of the hill do you begin to hear the M3 as it ploughs through a gash in the next crest - Twyford Down. And, whisper it for fear of waking the ghosts of the protesters who camped here in 1993, it is the motorway that made the quiet of the walk possible. Confused? Before the ruin of Twyford Down, another road, the Winchester bypass, carved its way between the water meadows and St Catherine’s Hill. But as part of planning approval, engineers had to remove the bypass. Which they have. To dramatic effect.

Peace has been restored to the water meadows and the walk is silent and unimpeded. The meadow has been reunited with the hill; the cutting filled in. This spring, on the path of the old road, you can hear skylarks, watch butterflies and sniff wild thyme. You would never know there had ever been a bypass here. Three cheers for the environmental engineers.

Here's an example of what, until recently, was a dual-carriageway:


That's still no excuse for the rape of Twyford Down. But it does show that, like the poet says, "Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse."