The Arguments against the 'Cutting' Solution - TrustNews May 1990
The principal features of the Government's scheme are as follows:
The new motorway leaves its current line about 150 yards north of Chilcomb Lane and climbs on embankment towards the Morestead Road. This brings it some 30 ft higher than the foothills of St Catherine's Hill, creating a new horizon for Chilcomb Valley. The carriageway crosses the Morestead Road slightly below the existing road level, Morestead Road itself being diverted down the embankment to the new Bar End junction. The crossing of Morestead Road is centred on a point about 50 yards east (uphill) of the entrance to the sewage works. The Cutting here takes out the western end of the Scheduled Ancient Monument, the Dongas and cutsthrough the Site of Special Scientific Interest that covers St Catherine's Hill and Plague Pits Valley.
The Cutting skirts the edge of Plague Pits Valley then takes a line out on to the spine of Twyford Down, on the steepest permitted gradient for a motorway, at the high point of the Down being more than 400 feet wide and nearly 100 feet deep. Descending towards Hockley, it avoids the Arethusa Clump but cuts a wide swathe out of the original Iron Age Settlement of Winchester (a Scheduled Ancient Monument). The Cutting widens as it comes out of the Down to accommodate the slip roads. The road now crosses the lichen Valley, just south of the GWR viaduct, on a very high embankment formed from the spoil from the Cutting. This embankment crosses over the present Hockley junction at a height of 57 feet, descends to a little below the parapet of the viaduct and then rises again to vault over the main London-Southampton railway. When the embankment reaches the earthworks which resculpt the area of the old by-pass, near the railway, it is again at a height of 57 feet above the valley floor and rises another 10 feet as it crosses the railway.
The road now crosses the current by-pass, an embankment, at the end of Place Lane, and cuts through a corner of Shawford Down to join the Compton-Bassett section at the present junction with the A31. This junction and the current Hockley junction are combined in a complex of slip roads to the west of the railway, rising to the Bushfield Roundabout and involving another road across the Itchen Valley between the viaduct and the embankment.
Landscape Damage - Twyford Down
The reason why all the national environmental protection agencies and the national newspapers have shown such concern about the Department of Transport's decision arises from the sheer contempt that has been shown for the statutory process of designation of protected sites. On Twyford Down alone, the Department plans to destroy more protected sites than are threatened for the whole length of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.
The great ridge of downland to the east of the Itchen Valley is designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The western extremity of this is all that really survives of the ridges and downland setting to Winchester that Cobbett admired, when he described the area as 'the finest spot in England'. Any Trust Member who has not already done so should view the route from Compton Down (Yew Hill). St Catherine's Hill and Twyford Down are intimately related in landscape terms, the head and tail of a splendid comma of hills etched out by the mysteriously wonderful Plague Pits Valley.
Some idea of the landscape damage of the Cutting can be got from the Department's photomontage (it is still surprising how many people believe this photomontage to be the work of opponents of the scheme). There are good grounds for believing the cutting width to have been played down in this montage and it also, undoubtedly, underplays the perception of the embankment. And, of course, the camera is more forgiving for a landscape like this, than the human eye. The camera perception is that of a broad panorama of which the Cutting is only a geometrical part, whilst the human eye sees only narrow vistas and its focus of attention will be forced on to the most startling aspect of the scene. What was a harmonious gentle scene becomes a narrow vista of contrast and discord. Some people may like the excitement of that, but not the people who admired the landscape as it was.
The Cutting may destroy only 20% (say) of the surface of the downs, but the landscape as it was, is gone for ever. Photographic evidence was presented at the Inquiry relating to an M40 cutting in the Chilterns and Cecil Parkinson referred to it as an example of how such a cutting can fit into a landscape. Apart from the fact that this cutting is of quite a different scale, is in an excarpment, rather than a salient ridge, is not viewable from opposing high ground, and is a good deal less visible by virtue of feeding into a naturally re-entrant fold of the hill, it remains a highly unattractive feature and merely another example of the Department's insensitivity.
But Twyford Down is a much, much worse case. Anyone who walks on Yew Hill and cares for the beauty he sees, must surely agree that, even in terms of landscape alone, and even from this viewpoint alone, the Department's proposal is so grotesque as to be intolerable.
But of course, there are many other places from which this Cutting would be seen, including, for those who like to pretend this is not Winchester's problem, from many points on the high western ground within the City itself.
Landscape Damage - The Embankment
Those wishing to gain some impression of the embankment should go to Hockley lights and look up at the tall television mast there. The carriageway of the Department's route is only very slightly lower than the top of this mast.
As a landscape feature seen from Twyford Meadows, the embankment would be an unremitting, unvaried and immense barrage. Seen from the Winchester side, the middle section (but not all of it!) is screened by the viaduct (although traffic would be visible along most of its length). The viaduct itself is threatened again with demolition and the Department of Transport says this is no concern of theirs. Deprived of the viaduct, Winchester's meadows south of St Cross would have the same bleak prospect as Twyford Meadows. The Cutting, as it crosses Morestead Road, destroys the most significant and best preserved part of the mediaeval tracks, called the Dongas, where they can converge on the Roman Road. Quite apart from the archaeological significance of the site this is an area of mysterious beauty, with a feeling of great ancientness. It is here also that the most important colony of Chalk Hill Blue butterflies in Southern England will be destroyed.
The Department's route involves other archaeological losses, but by far the most important damage to our heritage comes from the destruction of the Iron Age village. Anyone who has read Mr Denton Thompson's appreciation of this site, published in the Hampshire Chronicle in February will know that the village and the hill fort of St Catherine's are intimately bound up, complementary parts of a single complex settlement. Here is the 'first major metropolis, mother to Venta Belgarum, the Roman Town at Winchester'.
There are very few aspects of the heritage of Winchester which should demand more attention from the Preservation Trust than this astonishing survival.
The Low Level Alternative
The JAG low level (tunnel) route does not dam Chilcomb Valley: it does not destroy the Dongas or the butterflies, or the Iron Age Village of ancient Winchester: it does not ruin the western promontory of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty or dam the Itchen Valley. With cut-and-cover it does not sever Shawford and Compton. And, of course, it has all the same benefits of the removal of the by-pass.
The noise impact from the high-level (Cutting) route will inevitably be greater almost everywhere (including St Cross) than from the low-level route. There has, incidentally been a lot of nonsense talked about noise from the Tunnel - a tunnel is an ideal structure for baffling noise if special precautions are taken with materials. It would be better than any other equivalent length of motorway and much better than the high cutting, with its high gradients forcing engines into much noisier states.
What are the disadvantages? Much was made, by the Department, of the portals of the Tunnel, based on the absurd exaggeration of the Department's drawings. Continental tunnel portals are much less intrusive. It must also be remembered that the carriageway is so much lower and so much more easily screened by landscaping. Remember the top of the television mast at Hockley defines the Cutting road level. The top of a double-decker bus coming out the the Tunnel would be level with the bottom of this mast!
The slip roads at Bar End are more prominent than with the Cutting, but it is obviously better for the minor road to be higher than the motorway itself. The slip roads at Compton are also more prominent, but again must be preferable to the motorway itself being high. And remember this arrangement removes the appalling slip roads at Hockley, leaving only a simple crossing of the Twyford Road.
The 'lighting problem' is a mischievous canard. Because the Cutting is a sub-standard motorway (gradients and curvatures) it is certain that it will be lit. The Department of Transport has been looking at the lighting of all motorways and has recently been installing lighting on several sections of the M3. The small, but admittedly intrusive, lighting visible at the mouths of the Tunnel will be as nothing to the lighting of the Cutting. Imagine also the likelihood that the valley crossing will be illuminated far above the level of the viaduct.
Another piece of nonsense that has been propagated by the Department, is that the low-level route generates more traffic in St Cross Road (incidentally ignoring the corollary that their route puts more traffic on Chesil Street). The traffic on Winchester's radial routes is almost entirely determined by the City Council's traffic policy - the Department's 'traffic expert' was in the ludicrous position at the 1987 Inquiry of believing that the majority of the cars coming into Winchester would return by the same route, without ever stopping to park!
The Department of Transport scheme is an environmental disaster. It is probably the most damaging road scheme currently being planned in Western Europe.
It is recognised as a scandal by the main national environmental bodies, by the Times as 'motorway madness' even by the popular motoring magazine Auto and Express, as 'Parky's Folly'.
How many people in Winchester are aware how lucky they are to have a landscape setting as lovely as the Itchen Valley and the downland promontories? How many Winchester people are aware just how terrible this scheme would be? Is it possible that they will only learn to value it when they have lost it?