It is forty years since cars first rolled onto the M27 motorway.
The 25 mile long motorway runs between Cadnam on the edge of the New Forest, skirts the top of Southampton and eventually reaches Portsmouth in the East. It is fed by the M3 which brings traffic from the M25 and the rest of the UK road network.
It is undoubtedly a significant birthday, but there is a suggestion that it is not actually finished.
The birthday is only really relevant to the first part of the motorway which opened in August 1975 between junctions one and two. It was open as far as junction four by December 1975 with the whole length being finally accesible by 1983.
Folklore suggests that the original plan for the M27 was for some sort of south coast superhighway, linking to the major trunk roads in the west and stretching all the way to the channel ports at Dover, giving a clear run from the west country to the continent. The Pathetic Motorways website, which is a brilliant resource for time wasting road trivia, says this was never really the case.
Such a proposal was mentioned by the Institution of Highway Engineers in 1936, but it was never aired beyond that. One reason would be the viability of such an expensive road building project, but also the difficulty of bulldozing a path through both the New Forest and Dartmoor National Parks would be sensitive, both politically and environmentally.
In fact the original plan for the motorway was for it to reach Chichester and become a motorway to run along a significant length of the UK's south coast. The research from Pathetic Motorways says that plans were very much afoot for the M27 to continue beyond the current end in Portsmouth, with extra spurs and appendages.
Some were built, such as the M271 Totton Spur which squirts motorists into the western end of Southampton, and the M275 into the heart of Portsmouth. The proposed M272 into Southampton was never built as a motorway, but now exists as the A335.
Check a map and you'll see the M27 seems to stop just shy of the A3(M). However full motorway standards are in place until east of the A3M interchange and Highways England manages it as motorway as far as that, so it could be said that it is a motorway in all but name as far as there.
Although road building is now back on the government agenda, it seems unlikely that the M27 will ever be significantly longer than it is currently so we can probably conclude that it is in fact, complete.
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There are some plans for the
It is on the website
Www.marlowes.com Dorset trunk roads, ( I cannot put the link on as it is saying it is spam
I have also seen old plans for the Lewes to Eastbourne section.
There is also a GCSE DT project by a student looking at possible bypasses of Worthing.
Basically there are plans for the whole road from Dorchester to Ashford, made into a major D2 road, with GSJ Along most of the way.
Friends from the North didn't believe me when I told them it took as long to get from Brighton to Hastings as it does from Brighton to Oxford, unless the road is clear from Lewes and you can do 60mph.
I live in Bexhill and the whole of the East Sussex coast is a backwater, especially during holidays.
Last week it tok me 30 mins to drive the 7 miles to Hastings at 10:30 in the morning.
Unfortunately, politicians are frightened to put money into the coastal strip due to the close links with London.
Several years ago the Freight Transport Association said that a south Coast trunk road would remove 20% of freight traffic from the southern section of the M25. That would be a lot of lorries.
By the way the Pathetic Motorways site is great and shows some of the roads that we should have had built.
@ wolvesfan
I understand your point about Eastward bound route being lacking,and agree, but still think the A303 should have been developed to cover the greatest number of travellers going West.
not true
despite this the biggest need is east on the route to the land that time forgot (Hastings). to get from Bournemouth to Eurostar one has to take the M3 and M25/M20 and add over 50 miles. Hastings needs an M27 extension and so does the whole south coast east of Portsmouth