Five plans to do away with A6 hazards

The accident-prone A6 road will lose some of its hazards when the County Council carries out schemes it now has in hand.

The schemes, which have been approved by the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation, relate to five different stretches of this road, at Rushden, Rothwell and Desborough.

A spokesman of the County Surveyor’s Department said: “We will start when the Ministry makes the necessary funds available. We hope and expect this will be within the next 12 months, but we cannot give a definite date at present.

“The idea of the improvements is, of course, to facilitate the flow of traffic and by doing this, of course, we will be cutting down the accident rate.

“It is too early yet to give an estimate of how much it will cost.”

An estimate has been given, however, for the cost of improving Cheney’s Corner, Rothwell — £4,675.

“We want to put in proper banking at this point,” said the spokesman, “At present, with only slight banking, many cars tend to cut the corner, as the camber makes the road equally even there.”

Another scheme which will improve the A6 is the reconstruction of the length of Bedford Road, Rushden, between Harborough Road and Manning Street, to provide a wider carriageway with a better camber and a new footpath on the east side.

Bad Camber

“That section of the road is rather narrow with very bad camber indeed,” he said, “and there is a deep open culvert on the east side of the trunk road through there. We are going to fill in the culvert or rather, make it into a true culvert and provide a footpath there instead. We also intend to improve the very bad camber.”

Duck Street, Rushden, is also on the improvement list. At present the sight lines at the junction of the A6 and Duck Street give motorists very poor visibility.

The County Council means to improve this visibility by acquiring two triangular strips of land.

At Desborough, where Buckwell Street and Lower Street join, there is a bottleneck. “By widening the road where it forks we hope to do away with this,” they say.

While it is expected that the first four schemes will be completed during the current year, the fifth improvement, which entails the widening of High Street, Rushden will probably be included in the estimates for 1957/8.

The High Street at this point (along the frontage of St. Mary’s Church) is too narrow and in order to provide a carriageway thirty feet wide and a new footpath seven feet six inches wide, the council wants to take a strip of land in front of the churchyard.

Graves on A6 Land

After the granting of a faculty under which it is proposed to surrender a portion of the land so that the A6 can be widened, two further graves, which had been hidden by undergrowth, have been found in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, Rushden.

These graves date back to the late nineteenth century.

Notice of the discovery has been published by the church authorities, and if no complications arise, the land will be handed over to the road authorities as a gift. The widening may take place within the next financial year.

Decision on Road ‘Vital’

A decision on the A6 by-pass is of vital importance, Mr. A. Norman Groome told a Ministry of Housing Inspector at a local public inquiry at Rushden on Tuesday.

Mr. Groome was representing Mr. J. E. Knight, of Rushden, who was appealing against Northamptonshire County Council’s decision to refuse planning permission for a housing site on 7.6 acres of land off Newton Road.

Mr. Groome said the proposed two-town (Rushden-Higham) by-pass – something he could remember hearing his father talk about – ran through a corner of the field.

Decision

However, he pointed out, the County Council and other local authorities had suggested to the Ministry that the proposed by-pass should take another route. Until there was a decision on the latter, one was struck with the first.

Until they could get a decision the two-town by-pass was strangling development, because all development in the towns was being pushed up against it.

Mr. R. G. Sawtell, senior assistant solicitor with the county council, said that until a decision was made on the by-pass route they had to work on the existing line of the by-pass, which ran across the appeal site.

Undeveloped

He added that the County Council did not accept that the by-pass line was strangling Rushden and Higham, or that there was a pressing need for residential development.

There was something like 150 acres of undeveloped land scheduled in the Town Map for residential development, and he contended that this left ample land available for Rushden’s natural increase in population and need for housing.