The roundabout question

Tell someone you are from Basingstoke and there is a decent chance the next word you hear is “roundabouts”. The town has been called Doughnut City and Roundabout City for long enough that it is in most descriptions of the place, usually somewhere near the top.

So, is it fair?

Where they came from

Mostly, yes, and it is not an accident. When Basingstoke was rebuilt in the 1960s to take London’s overspill, the new town centre came with a new road system to match. The council’s own appraisal describes major road schemes going in alongside the redevelopment of more than half the old town.

The centrepiece was the Ringway, a ring road built in the 1960s that encircles the central area. The main roads into town radiate from it like spokes from a hub, and Churchill Way cuts across the middle from east to west, passing under the town centre. Where spokes meet a ring you need junctions, and Basingstoke’s answer, again and again, was a roundabout.

One roads website files Basingstoke among the towns planned and built “back when we thought the car was king”. Technically Basingstoke was never a New Town at all: it was an “expanded town”, with no development corporation. The roads did not get the memo.

The big ones

A few of the roundabouts have become landmarks in their own right, in the way that only something you sit in traffic at every day can.

• Black Dam roundabout, in the south-east of the town, links the M3, the A30 and the A339. In 2014 it was in the middle of a £10 million scheme to widen it to four and five lanes. The scheme drew criticism for having no provision for cyclists, with the local MP telling Parliament that the existing layout made cycling difficult.
• Brighton Hill roundabout got its own £20 million upgrade from 2022: extra lanes, traffic signals, cycle lanes and new lighting. The contractor’s site compound was the car park of the old Camrose football ground nearby.

There is a pattern here. The 1960s gave Basingstoke its roundabouts, and twice in the last dozen years someone has spent millions making them bigger.

Is it actually worse than anywhere else?

Honestly, we don’t know. Nobody seems to have done a proper count, and other towns built in the same era have plenty of their own. What Basingstoke has is the combination: a ring road, a lot of big roundabouts close together, a motorway junction, and a reputation that got there first.

The case for the defence

The roundabouts are not the whole story of the town, which is rather the point of this website. Close to Black Dam roundabout are Black Dam Ponds, a nature reserve with kingfishers. Not far beyond the Ringway is a Tudor palace besieged by Cromwell. The roundabouts are how most people meet Basingstoke. They don’t have to be how they leave it.

And if you are visiting by car: get in the correct lane early, trust the signs over your satnav, and remember that everybody else at the junction is also slightly annoyed. It helps.