Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

BUCKDEN IN THE TURNPIKE ERA 201 CHAPTER18/ BUCKDEN IN THE TURNPIKE ERA Peter Ibbett The Great North Road through Buckden and the road from Buckden to Brampton and Huntingdon, are so ‘ruinous and bad’ that the highway authorities can no longer cope with repairs. The solution? To share costs through a private finance initiative – by setting up a turnpike trust.- well, this is 1725! uckden was a thriving coaching stop on a main route from London to Edinburgh during the Turnpike Era. Inns such as the George and the Spread Eagle would have been a hive of activity twenty-four hours a day as men, women, children, coachmen, guards and horses all required refreshment on their journeys north, south, east and west. The main coaching age lasted little more than a century. A young Buckden boy in the 1720s would have seen the change from a trickle of coaches to a constant stream of humanity passing by the crumbling walls of the Towers. His son would have assumed that the hustle and bustle of the coach traffic would last for generations to come; yet his own son could have lived to hear the first steam train whistle and to witness the return of Buckden to the relative peace and quiet that his grandfather had known. Historical Background In 1555, the maintenance of roads in England was made the responsibility of the parishes through which they passed. Over the next hundred years, this came to be an impossible burden on parishes crossed by major highways – of which Buckden on the Great North Road was one. As wheeled traffic became increasingly frequent (and physically heavier), roads deteriorated faster than local resources could repair them. In 1663, Parliament reluctantly agreed to the temporary introduction of turnpikes or toll-gates: barriers where fees could be levied on travellers and used to supplement parish maintenance efforts. Responsibility for administering the few (six) roads turnpiked over the next forty years was given to county surveyors reporting to local justices of the peace. In 1706, however, a new system was adopted: turnpikes controlled by trusts set up through private Acts of Parliament. A trust not only collected tolls, but could raise money via loans and private investment and could pay a good rate of interest on savings invested with them. A large number of trustees would be listed in an act, but few of them would be involved in its actual running. 1 The rest, chosen from the most trusted sections of society (such as MPs, peers and lawyers), were there to inspire investor confidence. Which they did: the number of turnpiked roads increased rapidly. One hundred and forty-one new turnpike acts were passed between 1706 and 1750, and no less than 389 between 1751 and 1772 (a period known as the Turnpike Mania, foreshadowing the similar Railway Mania of the 1840s). By 1837, there were 1116 trusts controlling around 22,000 miles of British road (18% of the estimated total) with at least 7000 gates at which tolls were taken. The Railway Era destroyed their profitability; the last trust folded in Anglesey in 1895. (Hey, 1998; Albert, 1972) The Turnpike Road through Buckden The road through Buckden was turnpiked in 1725 as part of the Biggleswade to Alconbury Turnpike Trust. A branch of this road ran to Huntingdon via Brampton providing a second road in the parish which was administered by the Trust. The King’s Highway on which Buckden stood was certainly in need of attention. In 1724 Daniel Defoe was moved to remark that the road between Hatfield House and Buckden was a ‘most frightful way’. Along one stretch, travellers and even coaches turned off it on to private land to avoid the ‘sloughs and holes, which no horse could wade through’. (Defoe, 2007) 1 Extracts from the act setting up the turnpike road through Buckden are in an Appendix to this chapter. They include the names of over ninety trustees, listed in strict social order; to conduct the trust’s business only seven of them needed to be present! B