User talk:Ritchie333

Hi Ritchie!

Not sure what you think or whether you can be bothered - but it might be nice to start making listings of things on Hansard here, in the same way as we have categorised and provided commentary on files in archives.

Depends how "into" research you are, but for me, I find this place very useful for keeping track of what I've found previously. Without it I'm left scrabbling around for bits of paper and trying to remember where I found a particular detail. If it would be useful for you to catalogue things other than National Archive files then do as you please - I think I enabled general users to do pretty much anything on here so fill your boots. --Chris5156 10:36, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Well ideally I'd take a laptop into the National Archives and type everything up on a text editor - since I can scribble down information several orders of magnitude faster than on pen and paper. Nevertheless, that would still be "rough" notes, and I'd use this place to flesh out the vague scribbles so they make sense to everybody else.

To be honest, the main thing I've always been interested in is the history of roads, particularly any social, political and geographical reasons behind picking a particular main route. I think I've played down this interest a bit since Guy banged on about route numbering until everybody was sick of it. Still, I would definitely like to get hold of a published copy of the 1922 Roads List and get every route logged, probably by transcribing it via camera copies (or getting somebody with lots of time and motiviation like ooooh Jeni perhaps ;-D). I'll drop DavidB a line to see where he got his copy from and what the actual published title is.

You have a very good point about Hansard - I didn't keep any references of the notes I used for the Winchester Bypass page on the wiki, for example. I think is primarily because I could google for them again if I had to, but obviously this will take time and effort. The main thing I would say is that "files" in Hansard are a lot shorter, they're typically analogous to an individual letter or paper inside an MT file. So we're likely to find more of them. Still, might as well give it a go and see what happens. --Ritchie333 11:03, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

One of my ideas for this was that I would take my laptop into the archives and type the notes straight into the wiki, avoiding the whole pencil-and-paper-and-typing-it-up-later part of the process. Unfortunately the site is blocked on the Kew wifi network, so I can't even look things up, let alone add to them. Ho hum. --Chris5156 17:28, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

South Orbital Road

Your shopping list has an entry for "ARTERIAL AND TRUNK ROADS: Proposed South Orbital Road" which queries whether it's R2 or R3 in disguise.

It's actually the predecessor to what briefly became Ringway 4, and is now the M25 between Chevening and Heathrow, more or less. In the 1920s and 1930s there was an aspiration to have a broad ring road around London, complementing the urban North and South Circulars with rural North and South Orbitals. The North Orbital was commenced and still exists with that name in parts of Hertfordshire - the number A405 was reserved for it but it's variously A405 and A414 now.

My guess is that this file will deal with plans to begin work on the matching South Orbital at around the same time. It isn't planning for one of the Ringways, but it might show how they settled upon a route that would later be recycled for the M25 and might explain why the North Orbital got started and the South Orbital didn't. --chris5156 13:40, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Of course, A405 wasn't reserved for the NOR in 1922 - A405 was in West London then. Still, this sounds like it'll either be a really interesting file, or one sheet of tat. Steven 23:19, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Wise words there. Last week when I was in with Chris, I stayed right up until closing time just to grab MT 39/311 to quickly do rough camera copies of maps or planned routes. In retrospect, I needn't have bothered. --Ritchie333 09:22, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I think Category:Waste of Time might be our fastest-growing page! --chris5156 17:28, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

MT 39/241

I think we can remove the 'stub' template from this page now, unless you have some pretty epic plans for it? :) --chris5156 22:05, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't see why not - I think I've gone through the whole file now and extracted most of the interesting bits of it. I think there's one or two odds and sods I wanted to camera copy for reference, but nothing else. I'd be tempted to "de-stub" MT 39/246 for the same reason. --Ritchie333 10:12, 18 February 2010 (UTC)