A circle road

Just as in the years following the Second World War, there had been a new degree of enthusiasm for owning a motor vehicle in the early 1920s as life settled down once more after WW1.  There was also a significant interest within the commercial world for deliveries of goods by large motor vans and lorries; horse-drawn carts would gradually be replaced.

St Albans, of course, was significantly smaller than it is today, and most roads, with the exception of St Peter's Street and a few hundred yards of Victoria Street, were the same width and standard as they had been in the 18th century or earlier.

King Harry Lane – who remembers it
like this?

Yet, St Albans Council did appear to be aware that in the future its highways would need to be laid out to accommodate a petroleum world and in exponentially increasing numbers.  An ordered world for filling points, parking, junctions and speed  would have to be wrenched  from early chaos.  The modern highway was new territory in a new age.

So, in an effort to divert as many vehicles as possible from the city centre, the Council borrowed a well-tried idea from elsewhere and planned what it called a "Circle Road".  We would recognise it today as the Ring Road, but in the mid 1920s it did not exist except as a "future planned road" on its planning maps.  In terms of cost it was never actually conceived as a complete circle, because the government was already building a series of strategic highways, including an upgraded A1 and the North Orbital Highway of which the Barnet Bypass was part.  So, when complete, the circle road would approximate to the curved part of a capital letter D.  All the Council would have to do was wait for developers to bring forward their own plans for housing and encourage them to create a through road as close as possible to what the council had on its map.

The first section to be planned was a replacement for Everlasting Lane in 1929, although it was another twenty years before the machines moved in to create it.  Beechwood Avenue was the first to open from 1930.  The one section which was actually planned as a dual carriageway to protect mature trees (though never completed as such) was previously Green Lane and renamed Batchwood Drive at the Old Harpenden Road end.  The accompanying view of King Harry Lane illustrates how Marshalswick Lane and Hill End Lane had also been for centuries; and Beechwood Avenue had previously just been a footpath.

Unusually quiet Beech Road.  No part of the Ring Road had
been 'made up' before the 1950s, except a short section
of Beechwood Avenue.

As soon as residents of Beechwood Avenue began to move in to their semi-detached homes during the mid 1930s, and found that a bus would be travelling along their bit of the Circle Road, this, they complained, was not what they had imagined their road on the edge of town would be like. A group proposed that the Circle Road was therefore in the wrong place, and should instead be further out, even suggesting a line based on Oaklands Lane and Station Road.  The issue of Hill End Lane was neatly solved with the late 1950s London Road housing development, which had attracted government funding as a post-war expansion housing zone serving a few London boroughs: Drakes Drive was therefore incorporated.  Not quite a direct link to the North Orbital, but locally convenient, and avoiding a separate junction to it.

The final "bits" weren't completed until the 1960s: from Batchwood to Bluehouse Hill and part of Ashley Road previously known as The Ashpath.

The official sign was
never applied to the road

If the council thought that, after forty years, the Circle Road Project – now universally known as the Ring Road – was complete, there followed two further issues.  The first was a more-or-less universal dislike by those who now lived along the road, of signposting which re-directed through traffic away from the city centre and via the Ring Road.  The authorities eventually relented.

The second revealed a lack of junction planning.  Ring roads always generate a greater array of right and left turns, and since the road had only been designed for two lanes of opposing traffic, and was therefore just ordinary sections of residential street no margins had been allowed for in future expansion and more complex junctions.  In only one place was there space for a full roundabout (Batchwood). In all other cases there eventually sprouted traffic signals.  Two awkward junctions later became twin roundabouts.  One of these, Ashley Road, not only had an additional 45-degree road at the junction, Beaumont Avenue, but Ashley Road was a blind junction with Hatfield Road to its right, and was undoubtedly the most dangerous of all the ring road's junctions and intersections.

There is no denying that in 2017 the Ring Road is still, in parts, a congested route, not so much for its vehicular flow capacity, but the limited number of vehicles its junctions are able to handle.

Not an easy problem to solve.  But it is what we have, and even persuading drivers onto alternative routes, we must wonder where those alternatives are.