At Wessex Film and Sound Archive you can see and hear history, from late Victorian times to the present day, through moving images and sound recordings. The Archive contains over 36,000 film and sound recordings relating to Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, including film and tapes of local TV and radio.
This film is part of Free
Havant By-Pass construction, Langstone and Pook Lane
Watch as the countryside around Havant disappears under the tarmac of the future M27 - with nostaligic shots of Langstone Harbour and a very leafy Pook Lane
From the collection of:
Overview
We open with rose pruning scenes before seeing large mounds of freshly dug earth in open woodland. A woman walks down a leafy lane as yachts sail on Langstone Harbour. A digger waits on what will become a new road as traffic passes along the original coast road close to the harbour then more earthworks and new roads are seen. We take a drive on a newly opened section of the Havant by-pass before the action moves to a London office, where we get views from a window and see people at work.
The Havant bypass, depicted in this film, and otherwise known as the A/M27, is part of a route that ultimately connects Kent and Devon. Opened in 1965 by Lord Lindgreen, at that time the Parliamentary Under Secretary to Tom Fraser, the then Minister of Transport, the Havant section of the route proved a much needed bypass that could cope with the growing local traffic from a fast growing local population, as well as long distance traffic using the trunk route. However, today it is much quicker for traffic travelling between Southampton and Margate to use the M25, rather than risk the bottlenecks that continue to plague the A/M27 along its route.