This page was updated in May 2021

Common expressway questions answered

What was the Oxford to Cambridge Expressway?

An expressway is a minimum dual carriageway, up to a three-lane motorway. The Oxford to Cambridge Expressway would have linked the two cities, and therefore effectively linked the M4 to the M1.

The expressway was never just a road. The project was designed to support urban development, with a proposed total of one million new houses overall. Oxfordshire’s share of those one million houses will be 300,000, more than doubling the county’s current total of 280,000 houses. Buckinghamshire’s/Bedfordshire’s ‘share’ will also be 300,000 (a 66% increase on present housing stock), Northamptonshire’s 150,000 (a 74% increase) and Cambridgeshire’s 271,000 (an 81% increase).

What would have been the route of the Oxford to Cambridge Expressway?

In late 2018, Highways England announced they had chosen the very wide route ‘B’, which was split into sub-option B1 going West of Oxford and sub-option B3 going first South and then East of Oxford.  The two sub-options met North of Oxford, and from Bicester all the way to Cambridge they were more or less the same.

Apart from the difficulty of finding a route around Oxford City, there were also considerable challenges elsewhere along the corridor, most notably near Milton Keynes where the risk of community severance was a recognised but unsolved problem (see elsewhere on this website).

What should have happened next?

Highways England was on the point of releasing a Report showing five or six possible routes for the expressway (i.e. actual lines on a map, not wide corridors) in late 2019, but release of this report was delayed by the 2019 elections. After those elections, there followed a period of ‘pausing’ the expressway but it was only in March 2021 that the expressway project was finally cancelled.

What happens now?

Cancelling the Expressway does NOT mean the whole Ox-Cam Arc project has been cancelled. Far from it.

The government is even more determined to push ahead with this project The ambition for one million new houses remains, with the aim of achieving increased economic output from this already productive part of the country.

And, just as the Highways England’s expressway proposals were gathering dust on the Department for Transport’s shelves another transport body, England’s Economic Heartland (EEH), was developing a Regional Transport Strategy that involves developing and improving not just one but 13 road corridors that criss-cross the Arc region and beyond. The final version of these alternative proposals was released in February 2021. It should be no surprise that the two key corridors for EEH study in 2021 are the ones from Oxford to Peterborough and from Oxford to Milton-Keynes.

Ring any bells? It should do. The main area targetted by the cancelled Ox-Cam Expressway was …… Oxford to Milton-Keynes! (the section beyond Milton-Keynes, all the way to Cambridge, is almost all of expressway standard already).

And is the Expressway really dead? We can’t be sure. There are elements of some Local Plans (e.g. for South Oxfordshire) that involve improving certain M40 road junctions - in fact precisely those that would have needed improvement under one or other expressway alternative route. Some see this as the ’expressway by stealth’. We do not think the full expressway will be resurrected, but we will keep a close watch on any new road proposals that open up new land with the potential for un-necessary development.