A2300

Route

The A2300 is a short spur road linking the A23 to the A273 Burgess Hill bypass. The road is largely new-build and was opened in 1997 for precisely that purpose.

Hickstead - Burgess Hill

Old fingerpost on a new road

The A2300 begins at a dumbbell junction with the A23 at Hickstead. At the junction is a local service station. From here, the road heads east as a dual carriageway. The dual carriageway ends after a junction with some local roads and continues towards a roundabout at Goddards Green. Here you can turn off for Ansty or continue onwards. The road continues as a featureless road, with a footbridge being the only excitement en route. The road then terminates on the A273, which acts as a bypass for Burgess Hill.

There are two interesting points about this road. The first is that it is really dark along this road at night. When leaving the A273 and heading west, the darkness really hits you! The other interesting thing is that the sliproad onto the northbound A23 is about a mile long, and is two-way for most of its length as local access (the northbound offslip is similar but much shorter). This is the original line of the A23 and is marked on many maps as an extension of the A2300. Other than that it is a very boring road.

2020s Dualing

During 2019 plans for the Northern Arc housing projected were published, this involves new houses and roads to the north and south as well as changes all along the A2300.

First, almost the entire length of the A2300 will become a dual carriageway. At the eastern roundabout where the services are the, roundabout will enlarged to handle the dual carriageway traffic. The current cross roads (Starbridge Lane / Pookbourne Lane) will become a LILO. The current T-Junction with Bishopstone Lane was initially going to be removed for vehicular traffic, however after consultation it has been designed as an exit only (Left turn only) with no access from the A2300. The roundabout with Cuckfield Road will be altered to handle dual carriageway traffic. Changes will be made to the bridge between West End Farm and the Goddard's Green Water Treatment Works, but these changes are unclear. An additional roundabout will be added just after the West End Farm, this will where the A2300 returns to a single carriageway and the new Secondary Road named the Northern Arc Avenue will cross over, supposedly designed to carry some of the A273 traffic. The roundabout with the A273 is the only thing to not change, however it is likely a wider pedestrian path will be added to provide easier and safer access to the center of Burgess Hill. The entire length of the A2300 will gain a shared cycle/pedestrian path, when the road was designed in the 1990s, it was for a dual carriageway and a 2.5m path, however current standards are for a 3m shared space, as a result the path will be 3m where possible, however may narrow to 2.5m where land constraints apply.

The cost of the scheme is £23 Million -Updated Sep 2019-

Original Author(s): A228_mb

Links

• [1] (24.04.2019)