Transport Planning History

The Holford Report set the general structure for thinking even to this day.

Consultants Travers Morgan & Partners were commissioned for a Cambridge Transport(ation) Study in 1967, completed in 1972 for Ł150,000. Plans were proposed for:

the new route from Chesterton Road [what was to become Elizabeth Way]
dualling East Road and Gonville Place
a cark park on Gonville Place [Queen Anne Terrace car park]
widening Brooklands Avenue
a Railway route, largely alongside the railway, from Trumpington to Milton Road [this was still being hotly debated in the early Eighties]
a Northern Access Road
a gyratory system like Mitchams Corner around Willow Walk, Fair St, Maids Causeway, Four Lamps roundabout and Short St.

The City Council preferred the far-cheaper revival of the Outer Ring Road plans, abandoned 40 years earlier. This involved an outer link road joining Histon Road and Arbury Road to King's Hedges Road [which now exists] and on down Green End Road, Cam Causeway, across a new bridge in Ditton Meadows to Wadlows Road and Barnwell Road, across Coldham's Common, Brooks Road, Perne Road and on towards Trumpington Road. The already-proposed New West Road (connecting Huntingdon Road, Madingley Road, Barton Road, Chaucer Road and Trumpington Road) would then link to Huntingdon Road.

Prof. J. Parry Lewis and a team of planners produced some more ideas in 1974. They reckoned that Cambridge should expand to the south of the City and to the east of the new western bypass. A new shopping centre should be built south-west of Trumpington. They warned it would destroy the city centre if a new shopping centre was built there. A new centre should be far enough away so it will never merge with what it's supposed to relieve.

In 1977 the Northern Bypass was built, diverting the A45 and linking with the A604 (now A14) and the A10. In 1980 it also met up with the new M11 from London.

The Ditton Meadows bridge idea was revived in the early Nineties and again in 1995 to support a redevelopment of the Chesterton railway sidings.

A bypass from the A10/A14 Milton junction to Fen Road industrial estate on the outskirts of East Chesterton, relieving Chesterton, was proposed again in mid-1997, salvaged from the abandoned plans for the Chesterton railway sidings. However it appears to be too costly - a railway line has to be crossed.
(CEN 3-Jul-1997)

Around 1982, the idea for an underground car park (another of the periodically-revived schemes) was backed by major retailers offering Ł1 per sq.ft. of retail space towards the cost. Butt's Green and Parker's Piece are the two sites considered.