"Tom Anderson" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 3 May 2005, John Rowland wrote:

"Tony Wilson" a@a wrote in message
...

I have bought a few old A-Zs on eBay;

Could anyone with a decent collection please pin down when Southwell Rd
HA3 was built? Bonus points if anyone can tell me why it was built. TIA.

I'm intrigued. Why is it interesting why it was built?

Because it is several decades newer than every other road within a 3 mile
radius, except for cul-de-sacs, industrial estate roads, bypasses, and roads
built on the former Hendon Aerodrome. Unlike any of the other new roads, it
turned two previously sleepy neighbourhoods into the shortest through route
from Hatch End and Wealdstone to Central London, and the construction of
such a road goes totally against everything that is considered good in
transport planning - in fact, its strategic location as a cut-through means
that it is exactly the sort of road which, had it been built at the same
time as the neighbouring estates, would probably have been subsequently
blocked, or at least width-restricted, but there is not even much on the way
of speed bumps anywhere near it. Witness the fact that the northern end of
Shaftesbury Avenue has a footbridge, not a road bridge, to Lidding Road -
this is much more in keeping with conventional transport planning.

I haven't checked the house numbers to see if houses in Woodhill Crescent
and Shaftesbury Avenue had to be demolished to build it, but if they did,
its construction is even more surprising. It's almost as if there was a
couincillor living on Kenton Road and he wanted a shortcut to London.

I believe there is only one house on Southwell Rd itself, and that house's
absence on the OS 1:25000 map suggests that it might be only a few years old
and was not connected with the road's construction.

Anyway, thanks for all the replies - now that I have narrowed it down to
1963-1971, I might pursue the matter with the library, if I can be arsed.

--
John Rowland - Spamtrapped
Transport Plans for the London Area, updated 2001
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acro...69/tpftla.html
A man's vehicle is a symbol of his manhood.
That's why my vehicle's the Piccadilly Line -
It's the size of a county and it comes every two and a half minutes