Photo: Justin Cooke

Road Wars

M66 And All That

Ally Fogg takes a walk along the proposed route of the M66 expansion near Manchester; and finds both the environment and the local community considered dispensible.

Squall 12, Spring 1996, pg. 38.

There was a time when campaigns against motorways appeared simple. The symbols were trees and wildlife and the rhetoric was of environmental destruction and pollution; the definitive single issue campaign.

Over the last couple of years roads have come to represent much wider ills in our society, and the remit of protesters has changed accordingly. The key moment may have been in February 1994 when the M11 campaign shifted focus away from Wanstonia, where the destruction of 350 houses was overshadowed by a 250 year-old Sweet Chestnut tree, onto Claremont Road, a colourful explosion of modern city life, where issues of homelessness, housing and urban community became as important as pollution.

Since then the campaign against the M77 in Pollock has raised unprecedented local working-class support and highlighted fundamental questions about the very ownership of our cities and our country. This year, Reclaim The Streets parties, an offshoot of the anti-roads movement, have been rearing their gorgeous heads up and down the land to demand the slaying of the sacred cow itself, the motor car, for reasons as much social as environmental.

Recently I joined members of the No M66 Campaign in Greater Manchester for a Sunday stroll between Denton and Droylsden, a three mile stretch of what is to become the final stage of the Manchester Outer Ring Road. By the end I was wondering whether the route had been planned not by a civil engineer but by a political satirist. If ever the extent of the problems of modern Britain can be caught in a snapshot, it is here.

The starting point for our walk was Audenshaw Reservoir, lying empty while road building is in progress. This is a service reservoir (where water goes after use and treatment) not a source reservoir (where water supplies come from), so sadly we can’t blame drought orders on the M66, but the vast gaping space is a monument to the frightening array of resources sacrificed to motorway construction.

Further along we are treated to a stretch of the Manchester Canal, a horse pulls a barge full of smiling kids past us in a spookily tranquil moment, considering the reason for our visit. Dave, our guide for the day and an active member of the campaign, confesses: “I’ve lived here for years and I’ve never seen anything like that before.” We leave the canal and climb past a field that was accepted by the local council as a traveller’s site. Before it was opened, the Highways Agency decided to put the motorway across the only access road. Before an alternative site was found, the 1968 Caravan Sites Act was abolished by the CJA and another site is now not on the agenda. A Showman’s Guild site nearby is also to be closed without replacement.

As we climb a little higher we find a perfect view of the junction where the M66 will meet the other two main roads in the area, the A635 and the A662. The real reason for the motorway is immediately obvious; giant superstores are appearing. A massive new B & Q blots the landscape and the other familiar symbols of capitalism are spreading across every plot of land that is, or can be made, available. These supermarkets and fast food chains claim to bring jobs to the area, but they are largely part-time and low-paid, the kind which are good for keeping unemployment figures down but do nothing to ease local poverty or help communities.

A little further and we find the most brutal illustration of the heartlessness of the road industry.

Oakdale (Special Needs) Primary School is a small building which means a lot to its pupils. Later this year it will be closed and the kids farmed out to other schools in the area. It will be flattened and turned into a few yards of the M66. Government priorities are laid bare. Education, particularly for those with special needs, a dispensble luxury in comparison to the great god tarmac.