The Building Of The M1 Motorway

A Memory of Tongwell.

Living on Tongwell farm was for me a great deal of fun and we always had plenty of things to occupy our time. We attended school in Newport Pagnell and usually got there on the bike and went to our grandmother's house (Kate Daniells) in number 34 Spring Gardens. I left the bike at the house and walked the two hundred yards to the school. With the building of the motorway, our access to the road into town was cut off and the main contractors, Laing's, used to ferry us in a mini bus both to school and back again in the evening. As a youngster, seeing the road project grow was exciting as were the huge Euclids which were the primary machine for scraping away and levelling the ground. The road also cut through one of our fields and the part on the 'other side' of the road was sold off.

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