PREPARE TO BE APPALLED

Charles Clover walks the route of the proposed

Newbury bypass — and decides to lie down in front of the bulldozers

Last week I walked nine miles of England which will soon be altered forever. Tree- felling could begin any day on the route of the Newbury bypass, the most contentious road scheme in Britain. I went there, on a clear September morning, to form a first- hand view of the road, prepared if neces- sary to take the side of the residents of Newbury, smothering in traffic fumes and driven mad by a claimed 50,000 vehicles a day, against the young protesters already sleeping in tree-houses on Snelsmore Common. I went prepared to be dispas- sionate, balanced, analytical. And I came back appalled.

One has to walk the proposed route for the significance of the forthcoming battle — and there will be a battle, no doubt of that — to sink in. For the saga of the New- bury bypass is about more than a road. It is not just about transport policy — whether to drive or not to drive, which is con- tentious enough. It raises questions about whether we place sufficient value on our country's human and natural history, which is all that distinguishes these islands from anywhere else. Newbury, in the heart of England, has a symbolism reinforced by its role as the backdrop to two battles of the English Civil War. The outcome of the latest battle will be felt far beyond New- bury, as was the fight over the M3 through Twyford Down.

Ostensibly, the problem the road- builders are trying to solve is a simple one. Newbury is one of those once pretty little south of England towns which now looks cluttered and overdeveloped. It sits at the hub of radial routes into the surrounding countryside, forming an effective barrier to north-south traffic. Newbury already has a bypass, built in the 1960s on the edge of the town, but since then the town has sprawled and the planners, perhaps in a deliberate ruse to get a new road, recently permitted a Sainsbury's super- store to be built on one of its many round-

abouts. PO' `Love them or hate them, you have to admire their independence.'

The district council claims residents of Newbury are six to one in favour of the new bypass, but this may just reflect gener- al frustration with traffic in the town, which is in fact no worse than anywhere else in the south of England. The traffic moves but the roundabouts slow it down. Sometimes television documentary crews have spent days trying to locate a real traf- fic jam.

In the 1970s, the Department of Trans- port rejected the idea of a widened exist- ing bypass with flyovers or an eastern route which would have entailed the demolition of housing and damaged the nearby Thatcham reed beds. But the road- planners carried out little research into the sleepy landscape of water meadows, heaths and woodland west of Newbury which they eventually chose as their preferred route in 1981 (based on a route dating back to 1937). They also failed to tell anybody, during two public inquiries in 1988 and 1992, that the Newbury bypass was part of a national network of Euro-routes, this one connecting Glasgow and Burgos in northern Spain via the south coast ports. Thus the bypass is a major trunk road pos- ing as a solution to the traffic problems of Newbury.

Approaching from the south, the pro- posed route starts off relatively well, fol- lowing a pre-Beeching railway line through Pen Wood, though this happens to be a local nature reserve and a dual carriage- way will be wider and noisier than a rail- way line. It then cuts through a corner of the Chase, an area of wildflower meadows and woodland given in 1944 to the Nation- al Trust by Sir Kenneth Swan, a local landowner, with the intention that it should be preserved for the nation's plea- sure.

It is where the route charges on raised embankments 200 metres wide across the Kennet and Avon canal, the River Kennet, its minor channels and water meadows that any misgivings one might have sup- pressed until then turn to outright dismay. The Kennet and its tributary the Lam- bourn are among the most beautiful, unpolluted, unspoiled rivers in England. English Nature is in the process of desig- nating them as sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) for the fine coarse fish, brown trout, rare waterweeds and mayflies they contain. Neither of these designations existed at the time of the 1988 public inquiry. In any case, being an SSSI is no protection of the landscape, which will now be filled with the howl of vehicles at over 70 mph. Sadly, only anglers get to see this lovely section of the river, which is owned by Sir Richard Sutton. We tres- passed on an anglers' path. Sutton Estates, which objected to the road at the public inquiry, is now turning loss into profit by winning permission to quarry gravel for the road from under the meadows. They have also lodged an application to build 1,200-1,500 houses on land cut off by the bypass.

The dismay one now feels deepens as the route crosses into the pretty valley of the Lambourn, passing through the beauti- ful village and conservation area of Bagnor. The route runs within 300 yards of the home of Lord Palumbo, who recently placed his Bagnor Manor estate on the market. It will ruin the peace of the charm- ing Watermill Theatre, rendering it unlike- ly to survive, and take away the special charm of the tiny River Lambourn with its water meadows, a local nature reserve. With a last destructive flourish, the road then roars across Snelsmore Common, a partly wooded heathland supposedly pro- tected as an SSSI because of its nightjars, passes within spitting distance of Donning- ton Castle, and rejoins the present A34.

I use the word dismay, but I was not the first to do so. It was used in 1984 by the Department of Transport's Landscape Advisory Committee (eventually scrapped by John MacGregor when he was Trans- port Secretary) which reported that the route was 'unacceptable on landscape grounds'. The committee concluded that the western route was 'massively destruc- tive of a largely intimate countryside unable to absorb the impact of a major highway'. The committee warned: 'This will undoubtedly prove to be one of the most environmentally contentious proposals in recent history.' They got that bit right.

All this is without mentioning archaeolo- gy. Along its nine-mile length, Newbury's western bypass will destroy no less than 12 archaeological sites unknown at the time the route was planned, including two sites of probable national importance, a mesolithic settlement and a Roman villa. The Department of Transport has no plans to excavate these sites, merely to keep 'a watching brief' as the diggers go in. The route will also daniage the site of the first Civil War battle of Newbury, in which the Lords Falkland and Carnarvon were killed fighting for the King. It was one of the few battles which could have turned the Civil War for the King's side. But he was so affected by losing two of his closest sup- porters that he failed to press home his advantage the next day. Newbury district council, which is fanatically in favour of the bypass, makes no attempt to exploit the potential of the battlefield, which has now been listed by English Heritage.

What the Newbury bypass will trash is more extensive than at Twyford Down, the green hill outside Winchester sliced in half by the M3. I walked that route, too, and saw the so-called dongas, tracks 20 feet deep canopied with hawthorn, down which countless generations of drovers herded their cattle to market in England's ancient capital. Walking in those trackways was like stepping back 3,000 years. Many peo- ple, including myself, misjudged the battle of Twyford Down. The road-builders were confronted by an alliance of ordinary peo- ple — from colonels to New Age travellers — who hadn't followed the legal niceties but who felt that this road would destroy a part of England they would rather not lose. Road-building has the ability to bring out a love of land in the strangest people.

The same thing is now happening at Newbury. The middle-class protesters of the Third Battle of Newbury have been joined by Road Alert, a direct action group, which is now based in Newbury. There are two camps of educated young people, mostly in their twenties, around Newbury, one on Snelsmore Common where the protesters camp 70 ft up in ash and oak trees. They cook food and socialise in 'benders', gypsy shelters made of tarpaulins stretched across bent hazel branches. There is a man who is digging a tunnel which will cave in, killing him and anyone else foolhardy enough to use it, if heavy machinery moves on to the com- mon. People are ready to die for this land.

How did this route get approved in the first place? The answer is that, under the rules which prevailed in 1988, it stood no chance of being turned down. At the time of the public inquiry, no Department of Transport inspector had ever turned down a road scheme on the grounds that it was likely to be environmentally damaging. The Department was then, as the High- ways Agency still is, a great unanswerable conspiracy for spending our money on roads, based on the dodgy assumption that because people buy cars that entitles the Department to build roads over other peo- ple's land. In the case of the Newbury bypass, an inadequate environmental assessment was carried out (the subject of a complaint pending with the EU). The statutory conservation bodies knew better than to challenge the Department which had carried all before it for 30 years. Hav- ing overlooked bat roosts and dormice colonies in the path of the road — species supposed to enjoy protection under EU law —English Nature actually helped the contractors, Mott Macdonald, to move the dormice and to identify the trees where the bats lived — the best mature trees so they could be cut down.

There are many who believe that the road should be built, some with an interest in it, some without. The Earl of Carnar- von, owner of Highclere and head of the South-East Regional Planning Forum, told me he had been behind a bypass for the past 40 years during which time his estate was traversed, unopposed, by the last sec- tion of dual carriageway, only to stop south of Newbury. But he said he did not know how much his son, Lord Porchester, had received for the sale of the site of a service station on the proposed new bypass. Sir Gerald Went, chief executive of Vodafone, the biggest company in New- bury, lives on New Town Common which will enjoy a substantial reduction in traffic from the bypass. He told me, 'You could argue that it was vested interest for those of us who live just south of Newbury. Quite frankly, I live four hundred yards to the left of the present road. I get no noise. In my view it is millions of pounds' worth of disruption. The country has to be able to get its goods from north to south.'

What riles people is the degree of deceit, humbug and vote-buying on an 18th-centu- ry scale that has gone into justifying this road. The council's spokesman, Peter Gilmour, told me it was not possible to build a tunnel under the Kennet. This is simply untrue. Local Tories, Liberal Democrats and Labour are locked into a mantra which forces them to support the bypass. They occasionally panic: David Rendel, the Liberal Democrat MP for Newbury who supports the route, at one point implored businessmen to drum up some more support because his mail-bag was eight to one against the road.

And what was Dr Brian Mawhinney doing, giving the bypass his blessing as his final act as Transport Secretary on the very afternoon of the July reshuffle in which he became Tory chairman? Every conceivable explanation for this rushed decision seven months after Dr Mawhinney had called a year-long review of the scheme looks dodgy. Was it a final two-fingered gesture to the environmentalists, whom he had jollied along for months by holding a `great debate' about the future of transport policy? Did he not want to pass on the stain to his honourable successor, Sir George Young? (This is the most cred- itable explanation, but why change his mind?) Was he buying votes for the local Tory candidate in Newbury? No doubt he had that in mind. Don't the citizens of Newbury have a point about the traffic? I concede that they do, but they have also been conned. What is absolutely clear is that a solution to the traffic problems of Newbury does not need to be the western bypass-cum- Euro-route. Newbury's much exaggerated traffic problem could be solved by a series of tunnels and improvements to the exist- ing bypass, coupled with a few sensible traffic reduction measures. Many of the assumptions made to justify the route are outdated or flawed.

Suspiciously enough, the Highways Agency now refuses to provide anyone with the controversial cost-benefit analysis which is supposed to justify the £70 mil- lion project. Ninety-five per cent of the traffic in Newbury turns out to be from the Newbury area and is not through traf- fic, according to Highways Agency figures. With a bypass, the traffic problems of Newbury will be as bad as they are now in five or ten years' time.

Yet in defiance of decency, logic, and our cultural and natural heritage the New- bury bypass rolls on, a dinosaur of a road scheme conceived before the Department of Transport's admission that it is impossi- ble to build enough roads to accommo- date traffic growth — but approved afterwards for 'political' reasons.

Newbury's problems are those of any overdeveloped small town in England where there are too many cars and the only way to accommodate them has until now been to knock down the countryside around and let in an urban sprawl of roads, roundabouts, sodium lights, badly designed houses and monstrous industrial estates. Newbury is the latest example of politicians' cowardice in tackling the prob- lem of traffic growth.

There are national interests which politicians should be defending as well as the convenience of the Newbury shopper: the protected areas and ancient monu- ments which our voluntary groups and conservation bodies spend years getting listed. To what end? There must be places where the damage to the environment outweighs the value of a particular route. I submit Newbury is one such place.

If this road is built it will be the death of all I grew up to believe was England: its fairness, its sense of landscape, history and nature. If he is the man I think he is, the bicycling Transport Secretary, Sir George Young, will simply let the New- bury bypass fall off the list in the autumn spending cuts. But if he builds the road, I will have no hesitation in standing on Snelsmore Common in front of the bull- dozers myself. And there will be plenty of Sir George Young's former fellow-mem- bers of Friends of the Earth beside me. It will be a memorable fight.

Charles Clover is Environment Editor of the Daily Telegraph.