Skem Mysteries 7: Half Mile Island

Posted by David Sudworth on January 24, 2008 10:28 AM

WE don’t do things by ‘half’ in Skem ... unless of course you’re talking about Half Mile Island!

For this beast is the daddy of all our roundabouts – the creme de la creme of traffic management systems.

It takes about a minute to get the whole way round, by which point you will have clocked up 880 yards (or a whopping 80,467cm for those of you working in metric).

On Monday, after many years navigating it by car I actually got out and waded into the middle of it, the purpose of which is illustrated by the photograph you see before you today.

I suppose I’ve always found Half Mile Island a curious structure.

Coming from a town with no roundabouts at all, I was always amazed (or is that horrified?) that Skem can pack so many into such a small area.

But Half Mile Island itself is, like many famous landmarks, a damn sight bigger when you see it up close.

To give you some idea, it took me almost 10 minutes to walk around the whole of it. And as the crow flies, it’s quicker to get to the end of the North Pier at Blackpool or walk around the pitch at Anfield ... twice.

But even if you take away the sheer size of it, Half Mile Island is an excellent example of Skem’s history both pre and post-New Town.

The land has never actually been built on – ever. It was once part of farmland which made up the old community of Stormy Corner. Stormy was, in fact, a tiny hamlet which stretched from the old Seven Stars pub (where the subway at the bottom of Berry Street is today) right up to Rawsthorne’s buildings, approximately where the recycling centre is now.

In the 1960s when the New Town development was in full swing, the idea was that the town was going to have a population of 80,000 and, therefore, needed a road system to cope with that.

Also, and more importantly, Stanley Industrial Estate was to be one of the first economic powerhouses of this big shiny new town and as such massive lorries would be coming along day in, day out.

The problem with Stanley was its distance from the M58 and as such Pimbo and Gillibrands overtook it, leaving the town with a massive roundabout which was basically running at 20 per cent capacity.

In fact, it’s only in recent years that Stanley has started to grow with the new Asda and Comet warehouses, meaning that the island is now being put to proper use. And with more land going up for sale opposite Great Bear and off Spa Lane, it’s now needed more than ever.

One final point that’s worth mentioning, is the claim that it is the largest roundabout in Europe. I was keen to check whether this was actually true, or just Skem urban myth and legend – you know, the kind of tall stories which always seems to involve Elvis not being dead and working in the Conny!

Well, according to Kevin Beresford author of The Roundabouts of Great Britain, Half Mile Island could, in fact, be the biggest in the world!

He told the Advertiser: “The thing is there aren’t that many roundabouts in the world and I’ve travelled from Land’s End to John O’Groats and never came across one that big.

“There’s one in Basingstoke but that’s only a quarter of a mile, so yours could be the biggest. Then again, it depends whether you’d class the M25 as a roundabout.”

And Kevin reckons that if it is the biggest in the world, the council ought to promote it: “You could have big lights on it and everything, plus a big sign. The council is missing a trick if it didn’t recognise this unique thing on its own doorstep.”

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