"The Canterbury Experience—A Lesson for Winchester" - Trust Annual Report 1974
Canterbury is a Cathedral City of almost exactly the same size as Winchester, and of very similar character; it is located at a comparable distance from London, and is also the first stop inland from a major port; finally, like Winchester, it is situated at the centre of a knot of communications, in a bowl surrounded by hills. Its road problems have developed in advance of those at Winchester, however, partly owing to the fact that the A2 London–Dover Road has been under genuinely heavy traffic pressure for longer than the London–Southampton routes.
The A2 originally ran right through the centre of Canterbury, but a major realignment of the approach from London took place in the 1950's, when a stretch of dual carriageway was built between Harbledown (the passage through the hill barrier) and the Castle (at a point on the edge of the old City centre as defined by the mediaeval walls). This new road (Rheims Way) had the double function of diverting traffic along a new line which skirted the City walls to the point where it turned off towards Dover, and of acting as a partial ring road for local traffic. It bears some comparison with the Winchester Bypass.
Much remained to be desired in the case of each function, however. Through traffic was still delayed in the later stages of its passage, and local traffic still choked the narrow streets in its attempts to circulate through the central area.
The latter problem, which was the responsibility of the City Council (Canterbury enjoyed county borough status until the local government changes of April 1974), provoked a determination to ease the flow. It was therefore proposed to extend the Rheims Way by a series of stages all round the line of the City walls (considerable stretches of which still remain standing), to carry local and "regional" traffic (as opposed to A2 through traffic).
In its original form this scheme was associated with an extensive programme of demolition, road-building and multi-storey car park construction in the City centre, which was a legacy from the replanning made necessary by wartime bomber raids. The local outcry against these central redevelopment schemes however led to their being extensively modified during the 1960's; but the more sensitively the core of the City was treated, the more it was insisted that a ring road was essential as a traffic excluder.
The ring road scheme itself involved heavy loss of historic and architecturally valuable properties; major severance between the inner and middle City areas; the ravaging of coherent districts of old housing; and massive intrusion into intimately-detailed riverside areas. During the late 1960's public opinion became increasingly hostile to this scheme, both in concept and in detail, and eventually forced the City Council and the Government Department concerned to join in commissioning a fundamental reappraisal of the City's traffic problems by a firm of traffic consultants headed by the well-known Prof. Colin Buchanan.
The Buchanan study, which took place in 1969/70 and cost £30,000, effectively cast doubt on most of the presuppositions which had governed the City's road planning. But by this time the consequences of building Rheims Way so close to the City centre were being felt in terms of a narrowing of the options available, and the consultants could only suggest that the Ring Road should be stretched a little further out in other sectors of its circuit. Thus what had been hailed as the definitive study turned out to be little more than the first stage in a fresh round of arguments.
Meanwhile the A2 traffic continued to pose increasingly intolerable problems. To ease its passage to the Dover Road, Rheims Way was extended in 1970/71 around a stretch of the City walls, so that dual carriageway covered the old City ditch and ringed the eighteenth-century Dane John urban park. Even so, the new roundabouts were quickly jammed up at peak periods by the traffic which these alterations apparently generated in excess of estimates, and pressure mounted in the City for a comprehensive bypass scheme.
The Ministry for some time refused to consider this, on the grounds that Rheims Way with its extension constituted a form of inner bypass. Eventually, however, after drawing up bypass plans for practically every village between the end of the M2 and Dover, they relented, and a wide-swinging bypass for Canterbury is now under discussion.
The irony of all this is that the interaction of the demands of through traffic and local traffic has produced a ring road scheme which is very destructive and brutally large in scale, highly inflexible, and much too close to the City centre to serve any useful purpose. Once begun, however, it has been carried on by its own momentum.
In sum, Canterbury's experience demonstrates that in a town of this size and type.
- The effect of directly linking a major through traffic route to a local circulatory system is to generate unacceptably high levels in the local system,
- A tight inner ring road effectively strangles the centre without relieving the periphery (which, indeed, suffers from additional, ring road-generated, traffic),
- The scale of the roads prescribed by engineers to meet these problems is totally inappropriate to the fabric of the City.
Thus it would appear that the following morals might be drawn:
- M3 traffic should be kept out of Winchester.
- Winchester's tight ring road concept should be re-examined in the light of modern knowledge of peripheral car parking and small scale public transport schemes.
The major difference between Canterbury and Winchester is that in the former case the redevelopment of the City centre was an early planning presupposition which subsequently had to be modified; the indications are that in the case of Winchester it is likely to appear as a possible consequence of the M3 road scheme.