Welcome to Rampart Road
Rita L. Jacob
Walking along Rampart Road today, it is difficult to envisage that, once, there were houses on both sides and it was a major highway, linking routes to London, Southampton and resorts along the south coast. Unfortunately, however, the increasing queues and gridlocks eventually led to the demolition of properties between St. Ann Street and Winchester Street, work on a relief road beginning in the late nineteen sixties. The Milford Hill side survived intact although four houses and a large building on the Tollgate Road corner later became part of a new housing development.
Buildings may have disappeared beneath concrete and tar but memories of Rampart Road as it was before the construction of Churchill Way linger on:-
So let me take you down Memory Lane,
Where I am a child again,
And terraced houses can be found,
Instead of tarred and concrete ground,
There behind each painted door,
A lost community lives once more!
An extract from Ode to Rampart Road written for the Milford Street Bridge Project
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