Local History

On 08 November 2006, the the final phase of the A500 - known locally as the D-Road - was officially opened as originally intended in plans that were drawn up over 40 years ago.

Listen as Geoff Burton, Church Warden at Stoke Minster talks about the chaos caused by the D-road when construction started back in 1970 and former policeman Spencer Browning, remembers the places and people that made way for the D-Road...

The road was first opened in November 1977 but during construction money ran out, so the road was finished without the grade separated slip roads and junctions that would have allowed traffic to pass smoothly through the area.

Hellish traffic jams and roadworks are fresh in the minds of anyone who has driven through, or around Stoke-on-Trent in recent years. But go back to the original construction project, in the early 1970s, and things were as bad, if not worse than this decade.

St Peter Church, 1826 (C) Stoke Museums

Devastating destruction

One of the areas most affected was Stoke town centre, where many streets, homes, and businesses disappeared under concrete.

St Peter's Church (now Stoke Minster) lost a lot of its land and outbuildings to compulsory purchase orders. The churchyard used to be a lot bigger than it is today - and contained an area known as 'the cholera patch', where hundreds, perhaps thousands of victims of a 17th century cholera epidemic were buried in mass graves.

But over 30 years ago, when the bulldozers came to start building the D-road, they had to go straight through the cholera patch - and there were disastrous consequences for the church.

St Peters had been promised £80,000 in compensation, but the council had such trouble digging up the graves that they ended up trying to charge the church for the work, and after a bitter struggle the church received just £3,000.

The Red Lion (C) Stoke Museums

Lost character

Before the D-road was blasted through the streets of old Stoke in the early 70s, the area surrounding the church was full of thriving businesses, homes, pubs, and characters from a bygone era.

Wharf Street was one of the busiest streets, in the area, and was home to the fearsome Ma Upton, who ran one of the best fish and chip shops in the area, but it's now all under the A500.