A1-The Great North Road
Do you have any memories of experiences on The Great North Road that you would care to share with a wider world?
Send them in for posting on this page.
When I was little, because my Mother's parents lived near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, we frequently went up and down the Great North Road to Newark to visit them. Since my Grandfather's death in the late 1960s I have only been up and down the road a few times and so tend I to remember it as it was in the 50s and 60s.
My earliest memories are of a long and tiring journey (at least 4 hours for 120 miles) up a road on which there was only one piece of dual carriageway; the by-pass at Stilton, which I believe was built just before the Second World War. My father christened this piece of road the "Alconbury Straight". At the end of this piece of dual carriageway, going north, the old road from Stilton came in from the left and very shortly afterwards you came to the roundabout at Normans Cross. I remember this very well as we used to stop here for lunch or tea at a lovely hotel called the English Garden which was on the north west side of the roundabout. The French memorial was just a few hundred yards past Normans Cross on the left going north. I had always wondered what it was and one day I remembered to stop so I pulled into the lay by that was there then and had a look.
Through the fifties and sixties the road was gradually improved with by-passes that gradually linked together to form one road and despite what people may say it is a vast improvement. A great deal of the road building was done by a firm called Monk but there were some sections built by Greene of Henley-on-Thames. The sections built by Monk were always finished on time I remember while those of Greene were invariably finished behind schedule.
The traffic before they dualled the A1 was horrendous, huge queues building up before each town. Baldock was awful with miles of queues each side of the town. Stamford was without doubt the worst; going north you would seem to be passing the wall at Burghley House for hours, creeping down the hill past the Swan Hotel then eventually up the hill into the centre of the town. Despite the increase in local traffic the traffic going through Stamford can't possibly be as bad now as it was then. Our journey north finished just after Newark where we turned off just after crossing the River Trent.
The Barnet by-pass was built before the war but was built three lanes wide with poplars planted either side. If you have ever wondered why Bignells corner, just north of Barnet, is so called, it is because there used to be a big plant nursery there on the crossroads where the Barnet by-pass crossed the A6. This nursery was called Bignells and Cutbush and my father would sometimes drive out there to get some plants for the garden. The site of this nursery must now be somewhere under the huge intersection between the A1 and the M25. The only section of the original Hatfield and Barnet bypasses that I can think of is the short section just to the south of the Comet roundabout in Hatfield; the rest has all been dualled even if it does follow the original route.
I drove up the A1 the other day for the first time in years and I hardly recognised anything except the names on the signposts. Imagine what it would be like if they hadn't improved the road though.
Roger
Corfield
B & B Lincolnshire B&B
©Biff Vernon 2004