AS you drive along Worcester’s southern link road today between Powick and The Ketch at the top of Bath Road, you come up close and personal with the area’s latest civil engineering project, the dual tracking of the embankment highway across river meadows which played host to the Battle of Worcester in 1651.

Back then Oliver Cromwell built a bridge of wooden boats to get his men across the Severn, in 2019 it will mean men, machines and technology combining to widen the concrete and steel Carrington Bridge so that even more vehicles can pass over it every hour.

Once finished, or probably even before, this will inevitably lead to the raising of a subject that has been remarkably quiet for quite a while, but once occupied many pages of newsprint, many hours of debate in council chambers and many voices raised, usually in opposition.

I’m referring to the old chestnut of completing the Worcester ring road, specifically by building the missing link from Crown East, just west of Worcester, through the parishes of Hallow and Grimley, erecting a new bridge across the Severn at Bevere and joining the end of the Northern Link Road at the Claines/Hawford traffic island. The project was known as the Northern Orbital.

Its supporters have always claimed that such a route would mean traffic approaching Worcester from the west (Malvern, Hereford or Bromyard) would not be faced with the Devil of three choices – either using the congested Southern Link, chancing the city centre or using the windy route through Hallow and Ombersley and the ancient bridge over the river Teme at Holt Fleet. Outspoken county councillor, the late David Muffett, was always a booming voice in favour.

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The idea of a full Worcester ring road began to gain serious traction once the Northern Link Road, from the M5 junction at Warndon to the A449 at Claines, opened in April 1965. This basically completed half the circle and while one of the remaining quarters, from Powick to Crown East, could be built without too much fuss as it was mostly across open land and not near too many houses, the same could not be said of the final segment.

This would involve the building of a third road bridge across the Severn and a busy new road slashing its way through or very near pretty villages with some historic properties. The cost was also likely to be astronomical. It was pitched at £17 million in 1993 when the last set of proposals were laid out in a touring exhibition and with the increase in land and property values, not to mention construction, since then Heaven Knows what it would be today.

Incidentally, its supporters have sometimes blamed the residents of the traditional Tory areas of Hallow, Grimley, Claines and Bevere for scuppering the plans and not wanting a new road near their “nice houses”. But in fact it was the Labour/Lib Dem administration of the then Hereford-Worcester County Council which ditched the plans in 1996.

Senior Labour councillor Colin Beardwood, chairman of the strategic planning and transportation committee, said: “There will not be a Northern Link Road (he meant the Orbital bit) as long at the present administration stays in power. Our view is it’s too much of a price to pay. It would be absolute sacrilege to cut through the countryside of Hallow and Claines and I don’t want to see a bridge across the river at Bevere.”

But that was then.