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Sunday Times map of where the new roads are planned
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Campaigners gathered yesterday (29 September 2012) at Twyford Down to protest against a whole new rash of road building costing billions of pounds approved by the coalition government.
Another group of campaigners was camping out at Combe Haven valley near Hastings, Sussex, to protest against the Bexhill-Hastings link road, which is said to be the worst of the planned new roads.
Twenty years ago, protests at Twyford Down helped to bring Tory plans for "the greatest road building programme since the Romans" to a halt.
Now the Government is trying to resurrect dozens of the road schemes that were abandoned in the 1990s.
One of the biggest proposals that may be revived from the 1990s is a dual carriageway across the Peak District, linking Manchester and Barnsley. The first stage, running through the Longdendale Valley, is being pushed by a group of local authorities. Anne Robinson, transport campaigner for Friends of the Peak District, said: “In the 1990s a similar project was only fought off by hard lobbying.”
The plans are being driven largely by councils and unelected local enterprise partnerships, little-known organisations dominated by business bosses and set up by the Government to promote economic growth.
“We found 190 new road schemes being put forward by LEPs and local authorities, of which more than 40 were direct revivals of schemes that were abandoned after the anti-roads protests of the early 1990s,” said Sian Berry of the Campaign for Better Transport.
Among the most controversial is the Hastings-Bexhill link road, which won Department for Transport funding earlier this year, despite running within yards of a nature reserve at Combe Haven.
The wave of 1990s protests, for example at the site of the Newbury bypass in Berkshire, saw the rise to fame of protesters such as Swampy, renowned for tunnelling under proposed road sites.
The Government was forced to cut the roads programme to just 150 projects — and when Labour won power in 1997 it scrapped those.
The anti-roads movement was boosted this weekend by a pledge of up to £2.5 million from the millionaire Mark Constantine, founder of Lush, the cosmetics group.
“We plan to fund all the community groups around the UK opposing road schemes,” said a spokesman for Constantine, who has already given an average of £10,000 each to some groups.
“The Government and road-builders have huge budgets and we want to help equalise that battle.”
Information from Sunday Times and CBT
Map of the current road schemes: Roads map
roads to nowhere