Oxford

Oxford is an historic university city, geographically between the South East and the Midlands. Most through traffic runs on the Ring Road, built between the 1930s and 1960s.

Inner Relief Road

The most controversial road scheme the city faced was a planned inner relief road running around the south and west of the city centre. Early proposals for the road were made in the 1940s and various schemes were put forward during the following decades. The 1940s and 1950s schemes consisted of at-grade junctions with the majority being roundabouts and some of the proposals had the road continuing clockwise around the north of the city centre crossing the river towards Marston. By the 1960s GSJs started to feature and the standard of the road gradually improved from then on. The main sticking point was the need to cut across Christ Church Meadow, an area of open land near the city centre bordered on two sides by rivers. Public inquiries were held in 1956 and 1965 where routes passing to the south of the meadow received far fewer objections. The northern extension to Marston was also heavily criticized by locals and this no longer featured in later proposals. By 1968 the plan was for an urban motorway standard road with spurs intended to capture traffic entering the city from several directions and the limited access fork junctions at key locations were aimed to direct them onto the relief road. Central to this would be two large multi storey car parks with direct links to the new road enabling commuters and shoppers to drive their vehicles straight into a parking space without having to use surface streets, an idea several other cities promoted at the time. One of these car parks, St Ebbe's, was built and the one way road surrounding it was part of these plans. The car park was demolished in 2015. Several roads in the city centre would be pedestrianised or restricted to buses only to encourage traffic to use the new road. The 1968 plans included several alternative alignments for the relief road with the recommended option being to pass to the south of the meadow as recommended at the public inquiry. This scheme is shown here along with the restricted roads in solid grey. Despite saving the meadow the road continued to attract strong local opposition which inevitably resulted in its abandonment sometime in the 1970s.

1968 recommended scheme

Route	To	Notes
M40	London, High Wycombe	Via A40
A34	The MIDLANDS, Banbury, Northampton (M40), Bicester	Via M40
A34	The SOUTH, (M4), Newbury, Abingdon
A40	London, (M40	Accessed by M40
A40	Cheltenham, Witney
A44	Evesham, Oxford Airport
A420	Swindon, Bristol (M4)
A423	Ring Road
A4142	Ring Road
A4074	Reading, Wallingford, Henley (A4130), Sandford, Oxford Science Park, Littlemore Park
A4144
A4144
A4158
A4165		formerly A43
A4183	Wooton, Scout Camp Site, Boars Hill
A4260	Gosford
B480	Watlington
B4044
B4150
B4495
A42	Birmingham,	now A44
A42	Reading	now A4094
A43	Northampton, Bicester	now A34
A4141