The Portsmouth Society - News
| News | The Great Portsmouth Gridlock | |
| Earlier news | In the 70s when we were fighting the East-West Road, which would have ploughed along Goldsmith Avenue to Langstone Harbour, the great fantasy - as we thought it - was that unless there was a great U-bend down, round and out of the city via Commercial Road and Eastern Road, the whole city would seize up with traffic like blocked sewage. Thirty years later, it actually happened. A driver crashed at 2.30pm on the northbound M275, but the police found a dead body only in the back seat, and thought the driver had fallen into the harbour. Throughout the afternoon and evening until after 11pm, more and more drivers found themselves locked into immovable streams of heated metal - while the hours slowly passed. There was no warning on Radio Solent, which merely said that there had been an accident, without suggesting what to do - like stay at home, go by train, park and go home...or advice from the police, whose weak excuse was they were still looking for the (non-existent) body and had no time to help get us moving again. Every main road from the seafront to the north of the city was immoveable. Deane and I set out at 4pm to go to a Thanksgiving supper cooked by our daughter's American boyfriend. By 6.30 we had just got over Fratton Bridge, where I dashed into the Bridge Centre to have a pee and phone our family in London... The turkey was rested nicely by the time we fetched up in Wimbledon at 8pm... School of Architecture lecturers told us they did not get home till 11.30 that night. What went wrong?? The Guardian ran a piece a month later 'Caught in a jam - A portrait of a nation stuck in traffic' 10.12.04, but what they describe wasn't on anything like the scale of our Great Gridlock. As well as the fear of a tsunami from an earthquake in the Channel near Dover - or just rising ocean levels as Portsmouth is the pivot point downwards for the British Isles - could a metal lock bang us all up again? Celia Clark |