A1

I have had a relationship with large parts of the A1 for much of my life, the Great North Road, the main road between London and Edinburgh.  Soon after I had learned to drive I would take my father in his car to meetings he had in Stevenage and then later, as my own career developed I would drive to the head office of the company that I worked for just south of Cambridge.  Until last year my eldest daughter was at University in South London which once again gave me ample opportunity to sample the delights of this piece of dual carriageway.  Indeed there are very few places that I am able to go from where I live which don’t seem to involve a drive along the road. I must go on it at least six days out of seven.

For over thirty years I have had a long, very long relationship with the road.  During my days working near Cambridge I reckoned that I spent close to a working week just driving up and down it, wearing a groove in the tarmac and getting to know every one of its twists and turns, so many hours that at times I felt that I actually lived on the central reservation.

But the odd thing is that for all that time there has always been some sort of roadworks going on.  The earliest that I can record is the removal of the roundabout at Wetherby which was always a bottle neck on a Friday evening going north, then there was the creation of the western bypass around Newcastle and the gradual removal of all of the roundabouts south of Nottingham at places like Blyth and Grantham.  There was the widening of the stretch between the A14 to Peterborough to a luxurious four and five lanes at times and the joining of the M1 motorway to the A1 to the east of Leeds.  Finally there was the gradual creep of the widening to three lanes north of Wetherby.  For over thirty years I have had to suffer one set of roadworks after another, suffered lengthy delays, suffered loss of my own time and suffered from the strain on family relationships.  I have also suffered from an inability to sleep caused by the flashing image of the white carriageway marking lines and orange cones going past in my minds eye.

Today I drove up home from Manchester over the M62 turning north up the M1 to join the A1 south of Wetherby.  I hadn’t been on this stretch for a while and was fully expecting an eighteen mile stretch of works between the Topcliffe junction and the services at Leeming Bar, eighteen miles of driving at what seems to be the painfully slow speed of fifty miles an hour.  But when I got there the roadworks had gone.  No longer were there any earth movers and no longer were there any average speed cameras.  The cones had gone along with the lane switching signs, the concrete barriers to keep the lanes apart, the men in hi-visibility clothing, the half dismantled bridges, the roadside petrol stations and the tar babies.  What was left were eighteen miles of smooth tarmac, three lanes in each carriageway, a hard shoulder and grassed verges and reservations.  The only sign that work had been carried out were some billboards declaring that 2,750,000 hours of work had been carried out safely and that it was all undertaken by loved ones.

It was as if the roadworks had never been there.  I couldn’t remember for the life of me what the road had been like and today it felt as if the A1 had always been that way.  So this is it, for the first time in over thirty years, as far as I know there are no major roadworks on the Great North Road. Perhaps it’s time to think about the stretch between Leeming Bar and Scotch Corner?