To: 1900, Eastleigh

Requirements:
1. A motorway
2. A roadbridge
3. A footbridge
.....


Above: The M3 running over the Leigh Road running over the Monk's Brook channel (Google Earth, 2008)

Chandler's Ford, Hampshire is a residential area about halfway between Southampton and Winchester, on the trunk road between the two cities. It is home to about six and half thousand people.

As the picture above shows, the M3 motorway crosses the South East of Chandlers Ford, replacing the trunk road from Winchester to Southampton. In the centre of the picture, another road runs under the M3, and the image shows that just before it does so, it crosses a stream - the Monk's Brook. A photographic history takes us back from the present day to the time when the crossing was a ford.


Above: The Leigh Road / M3 junction running over the Monk's Brook channel (1998)


Above: The new Leigh Road bridge running over the Monk's Brook (1922)*


Above: The new concrete footbridge running over the Monk's Brook (approx. 1917)


Above: The wooden footbridge running over the Monk's Brook (approx. 1910)

At this time, about one thousand people lived in Chandler's Ford, and it was largely woodland.
.....

* The person cutting the ribbon across the Leigh Road bridge is John Willis-Fleming, of Stoneham Park House, Hampshire. Thank you to Harry Willis-Fleming and the Willis-Fleming Trust for this information.

The Willis Fleming Trust has made available a contemporary newspaper report of the opening of the bridge, from which the following text is taken:

"The company proceeded to the bridge, a distance of about a three-quarters of a mile, part of the distance being over the new road, which is very new indeed, and was about the consistency of pea soup. The whole of the work is being done by unemployed labour so it is doubly beneficial. At one time as many as 94 men were thus employed. With very few exceptions they had worked well.

Mr Willis-Fleming having cut the tape and declared the bridge open said the days of the old "fords" had gone by. They had their uses in the past and they were quite sufficient for the requirements of those days. But the conditions of modern traffic required much more. That bridge now stood in an old country lane, narrow and winding. It was part of the scheme to divert and widen the old lane so as to make a really efficient modern highway."