The unfixable road that was vanished

A main road through a small town is in desperate need of repair. There's just one small problem: for all intents and purposes, it doesn't exist.

Don’t forget to catch up with this week’s Abundance Agenda podcast for a deep dive into the troubles at the ONS, plus some good news about the sorry state or WiFi on trains.

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If you live in Shefford and you want to visit the local supermarket, you have to follow one of the worst roads in Bedfordshire. Old Bridge Way eats cars. It is so badly degraded you can spot it immediately on the satellite view in Google Maps. For several long years, residents braving the route have had their vehicles smashed and shattered by potholes that rival moon craters. You would think the council would fix it but they won’t, because despite it being one of the main arterial routes through the town, they don’t own it. Who does? Well that’s a very difficult question to answer.

Part of this road is owned and managed by the local council. The other part is a mystery sixty years in the making.

Old Bridge Way passes through an industrial estate just south of the high street, with the usual small-town assortment of light industrial units and a decent-sized Morrisons. It’s also home to the local garage, which is handy when your broken car comes to a shuddering halt on the road outside.

The estate is the property of Daniels Bros (Shefford) Ltd, which you’ll be shocked to learn is owned by the Daniels brothers, Christopher and Colin. Units were sold to various businesses who pay maintenance fees to another company called Portland Industrial Estate Management Ltd, which is also owned by the Daniels brothers. This entity was responsible for the maintenance of the estate and the roads, and in recent years it received numerous complaints from business owners who were annoyed that they couldn’t get to their premises without their wheels falling off.

But then, in March 2024, something very weird happened. Unit owners started receiving the following letter, cc-ed to Shefford Town Council (my bold):

Dear Occupier

Re: Roads and associated lands at Shefford Industrial Park.

We write following several complaints to inform all that neither Daniels Bros (Shefford) Ltd or Portland Industrial Estate Management Limited have owned the above since early last year.

We are not at liberty to disclose who owns the above but can inform you that the owners are now in liquidation.

Any complaints regarding all the roads are best directed to either Shefford Town Council or CBC Highways Department.

As the roads will no longer be maintained by Portland Industrial Estate Management Ltd there will be a substantial saving on the maintenance charges for the year 2023/2024, as these charges are invoiced in arrears.

Yours sincerely

Daniels Bros ( Shefford ) Ltd

So who were these mysterious new owners who supposedly couldn’t be named? It’s a matter of public record, so let’s turn to the Land Registry¹:

It turns out that in May 2023 the Daniels brothers sold a portion of their estate (“Land at Old Bridge Way”) to a company called Freshfield Planning Ltd. The price was a single pound, which is vexing because it cost me £7 to get this document from the Land Registry, and for that money I could have bought seven local roads.

The history of Freshfield Planning Ltd is short but eventful. It was created in February 2023 with five shareholders and a bullish valuation of ten pounds. Just eleven weeks later, on May 2nd, the plucky startup bought its first road: Old Bridge Way. Why a new startup would buy a road is unclear, but getting one for a quid seems like a huge coup for the team and must have been cause for great celebration. Sadly, dark times were ahead. We don’t know what happened because the company didn’t exist long enough to file accounts. Whatever the reason, by March 1st 2024 they had wound up the company and appointed a liquidator. It was a dark day for the shareholders - Daniels, Daniels, Daniels, Daniels and Daniels - who walked away with nothing, having sold the road to their own company and then declared it insolvent.

But there was one tiny consolation, barely worth mentioning. Daniels Bros (Shefford) Ltd (owned by Daniels and Daniels) had ensured that both they and the management company (owned by Daniels and Daniels) were no longer responsible for the upkeep of the road. That duty had passed to Daniels and Daniels (along with Daniels, Daniels and Daniels)²; but sadly they could no longer exercise it - however much they wanted to - because their new company was insolvent. So all of the Daniels..s were off the hook. It was a silver lining for the Daniels family on a difficult - if confusing - day.

Let’s step back for a moment³.

Once upon a time there was a railway that carved its way across the town, crossing the High Street on a bridge which held a small station. In the 1960s the railway closed, the line was ripped up and the station was demolished. In 1966 the land south of the High Street was sold to F.D.O'Dell & Sons Ltd, a family firm established in 1839 that specialised in “metals and steel stockholding and skip hire” and operated from the site. In the 1980s the site was sold on to the Daniels Brothers. At some point a road was built - Old Bridge Way - and until the late 1990s it was a cul-de-sac of little wider importance.

You can get a sense of what happened next from the map below. Old Bridge Way is the purple line, running south from the High Street. The road in yellow is Churchill Way, which was built in stages as Shefford expanded and new housing estates were constructed. Sometime around the end of the nineties a bridge was built across the River Hit, and suddenly it was possible to drive straight from the roundabout at the bottom of the map - which is just off a major A road - to the high street, bypassing the main road to the East. Apparently at no point did it occur to anyone in charge that this created a main route using a privately-owned road, or that this might be a problem someday.

In fact, quite the opposite - they saw it as an opportunity. The new route became a preferred route for HGVs, and that wasn’t accidental. When Tesco applied for planning permission to build a supermarket on the corner of Old Bridge Way and the High Street back in 2009, it was delayed specifically so that the bridge over the River Hit could be upgraded to support heavier vehicles. The supermarket was never built, but the upgraded road became a key enabler of the council’s long-term plan to remove HGVs from the high street. The local transport plan from 2012 specifically mentions their desire to adopt Old Bridge Way for this purpose, but for some reason it never happened.

Old Bridge Way (purple), and Churchill Way (yellow). The later construction of Churchill Way and a bridge across the River Hit turned a cut-de-sac into the third side of a road loop around the town centre, and the main route for HGVs entering Shefford from the south.

Today the road is so bad that recently the manager of the local Morrisons had to go out and try to fill some of the potholes himself because they were destroying customers cars. People have planted flowers in them, and drawn predictable forms of street art. The local MP, Alistair Strathern, has been campaigning to try to get the council to pay attention but to no avail. In theory Central Bedfordshire Council should be able to adopt the road, but so far they’ve refused to, despite their previous enthusiasm, for reasons they refuse to communicate to anyone.

That brings us inevitably to King Charles III, who may have accidentally become the road’s owner. When Freshfield Planning Ltd (owned by… no let’s not start this again) became insolvent a liquidator was appointed, and the road will likely have been disclaimed as an ‘onerous’ asset - property with liabilities attached (the cost of maintenance in this case) that can’t simply be sold on by the insolvency practitioner. In theory this disowns the road, which reverts to the crown, although where this sits in the King’s list of priorities is unclear.

A recurring theme of this Substack is that the root cause of a large number of things that are broken in Britain is that nobody takes ownership of them. Usually I mean this in a conceptual way: people failing to step up and deal with a matter, whether it’s controlling the design specification for HS2, making sure a playground is able to open, or ensuring that a station car park meets the terms of its planning permission and doesn’t fleece train passengers. But in the case of Old Bridge Way… well literally nobody owns it.

It makes no sense that a main route through a town was established using a private road. Local authorities have had more than a quarter of a century to understand the problem and do something about it; to show some proactive leadership on the matter. After all, if the Daniels brothers were willing to sell it for a single pound, why couldn’t the council have simply bought it themselves? Instead, the council have contrived to make things worse - not only did they fail to acquire the road, they deliberately built the town’s transport strategy around it over the same period.

So the town remains in limbo and the road continues to degenerate. I contacted Central Bedfordshire Council to ask whether they intended to take any action or consider adopting the road, but they refused to engage with any of my questions, stating robotically that the “road is not an adopted public highway so does not fall under our management or jurisdiction.”

I’ll leave you with the response they gave to local residents who raised the issue on FixMyStreet. I can’t think of a better example of the culture we’re dealing with:

1. A side bar about the Land Registry - it’s crazy that information about who owns what land is locked up behind a pay wall at £7 per go, especially when you can license the data (for business owners at least) for free as a CSV file elsewhere on gov.uk.

2. I’m not sure what the collective noun for ‘Daniels’ is but I suspect it starts with a ‘c’.

3. Because I swear to Christ I have typed the name ‘Daniels’ so much that it no longer looks like a real word.