Will Grantham Ever Get Its Bypass? Brunel And Thatcher Would Have Wept
Anyone interested in an allegory of Britain’s relentless slide into inertia and a shadow of its former self need look no further than the trials and tribulations affecting the desperately needed bypass for the East Midlands town of Grantham, famously the birthplace and childhood home of Baroness Thatcher, and a vital transport crossroads hub in the heart of the country.
The works have been under construction for years, with part of the project being completed a staggering decade ago. They involve the east-west A52 being diverted to cross the East Coast mainline and the A1 to pass south of Grantham.
According to New Civil Engineer, in a piece from last autumn:
The opening of the Grantham Southern Relief Road (GSRR) in Lincolnshire has been pushed to late 2027 at the earliest as issues relating to installation of a new bridge on the project are dragging on.
Lincolnshire County Council’s GSRR is a new 3.5 km road between the A52 and the A1 being intended to reduce congestion and provide growth opportunities. It is being delivered in three phases, with the first two having been completed in 2016 and 2022 respectively. The third phase, designed by WSP and being delivered by Galliford Try, was expected to complete this year but has hit a significant issue with a new bridge that will cross the East Coast Main Line and the River Witham.
In February [2025], the council revealed that the project had encountered issues relating to the installation of the 293m long, 2,500t span. The devised method for pushing it into place over the railway and river was found to be unusable due to “concerns relating to specific wind conditions”, according to then Lincolnshire County Council executive member for highways Richard Davies. This was expected to delay the road opening into 2026 and push the cost of the project up by £10-20 million.
In an update from the middle of August, new Lincolnshire County Council executive member for highways Michael Cheyne said that a new temporary guiding structure for the bridge was set to arrive imminently and would be attached to the front of the bridge “over the coming months”.
However, a council spokesperson has now confirmed to NCE that the guiding structure has not yet arrived and is instead expected in October. Additionally, its cost is “not yet agreed”, according to the council spokesperson.
According to Cheyne in August 2025, “I can say with confidence that, once the bridge push does start, it will be approximately two years until the road can open. Please rest assured that I’ll be doing everything in my power to ensure this project doesn’t slip any further.”
However, by February 2026 little has happened since, according to a Lincolnshire County Council update, such as “West side of site – install temporary works to Pier 3 / maintenance for working platform at Pier 2 and 3.” Which doesn’t exactly sound like progress.
Meanwhile, in the United States the 1.6-mile-long Francis Key Bridge, which was badly damaged when a ship collided with it in March 2024, is projected to have been rebuilt to a completely different design by late 2030. The works have included demolishing and removing the old bridge, as well as planning the new one, both having been wholly unexpected. The new bridge will be almost nine times as long as Grantham’s vastly less complex new bridge.
The Chinese managed to build the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in three years, completing it last year. It’s suspended 2,050 feet (625 metres) above the river below.
Famously, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s design for the 1,352 feet long (412 metres) Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, which used existing towers and included significant modifications to Brunel’s, was constructed between 1862 and 1865 (Brunel had died in 1859). His Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar between Plymouth and Saltash was built between 1854 and 1859 and is over twice the length of the projected Grantham bypass bridge.
Meanwhile, the best that the leader of Lincolnshire County Council, Reform’s Sean Matthews, could come up with last week was “the council still needs to deal with delays to the Grantham bypass due to a design error, and the Spalding ‘Road to Nowhere’ which remains unfinished”.
Reform of course only took control of Lincolnshire in the elections of May 2025.
However, for now the bypass opening looks dangerously like dragging on into 2028. Recent drone footage shows the works in progress, if you can call it that. One wonders what Brunel, whose first name Isambard means ‘Man of Iron’, and our own celebrated late Iron Lady would have made of Grantham’s bypass woes.
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But what’s the cause? Bureaucratic decay? Diversity (i.e. appointing people who have the politically-correct group identity but not the correct level of competence)? Corruption? An infection of stupidity?
Add to that the need to get hundreds of NGOs (English Nature, RSPB, etc.etc.) to sign off on every stage of the project, and you start getting closer to the reality of managing capital projects in today’s “go-ahead UK”! (Put another way, it’s just another way of keeping thousands of otherwise unemployable bureaucrats off the streets.)
I live relatively local and there’s been unofficial rumours that the 2 ends weren’t built as planned and are out of line which has contributed to the delays and increased costs
Spot the eponymous contractor’s name! The image below was copied from https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/168m-grantham-southern-relief-road-opening-delayed-again-as-bridge-woes-drag-on-23-09-2025/ It shows the planned overbridge across the East Coast main line – no doubt there will have to be a possession of the latter while the installation is done, so the scheduling of that and the need for the related payment to NR (or GBR depending when it happens) will be an issue to deal with.
It’s so debilitating. We simply cant build anything these days. The volume of work involved in getting permission it utterly staggering. We need radical reform, nothing else will do but it’s exceptionally unlikely as most is environmentally related and the ConSocialists who signed Brexit prevented us from rolling back any environmental legislation. The lastest problem appears to be design related which smacks of incompetence and there will be an almighty argument going on in the background between the contractor and his designer which wont help. LCC are unlikely to have any in-house competence to deal with projects and problems of this nature.
Correct. Many of the delays (and blocks) to construction are down to the EU’s excessive Environmental Regulations – which we are still signed up to under the BRINO deal.
Tinpot 3rd world shithole.
Sad, indeed, painful, but true.
Don’t try to blame Reform! They came in very recently when the fault, error or whatever had already happened and had not been solved.
Too late for blame, but it would be a good test of Reform to see them achieve resolution of the Grantham bridge mess before we elect them to run the much bigger mess that is currently UK plc …
Of course, in Brunel’s time there was also an abundance of good quality, competitively priced, British-made iron and steel.
Meanwhile, the best that the leader of Lincolnshire County Council, Reform’s Sean Matthews, could come up with last week was “the council still needs to deal with delays to the Grantham bypass due to a design error, and the Spalding ‘Road to Nowhere’ which remains unfinished”. That is a snivelling cheap shot given there is unlikely to be much that the new Reform council could do. Would they be criticised if they spent money on a report into why this project was such a dismal failure and who was responsible for all the mistakes or would it disappear down the ‘lessons will be learned’ sinkhole where they never are. I feel the Reform councils should document all the expenditure they are forced into by the government that they would cut given the freedom to do so. I reference the lady who is leading Kent County Council who is forced to waste money on illegal immigrant scum because it is a government mandate. She should list it all out so when the snivellers come along and say you haven’t cut the spending like you promised, she can demonstrate why she can’t. It is a steep learning curve for Reform and the… Read more »
“he had no EU exit plan for UKIP even though it was their raison d’etre”.
Hardly fair when Farage was nowhere near government post the referendum and, even if he had had the most detailed exit plan, the Remainer Tory party wouldn’t have been interested in anything that would have made Brexit work.
Just the same in East Sussex to replace the single track bridge on the A259 over the Cuckmere River, estimated width 50 feet. Plans published 2020 and approved 2021 with £10.8m cost. In 2025 they found that inflation and National Park requirements put the cost at £21.7m. A first they decided that the new bridge would be single track but after public outcry it will now carry traffic both ways. What a shambles. No newts were harmed.
Galliford Try have been remodelling the roads around Halifax seemingly for ever.Very rare to see workmen on site and meanwhile businesses are going under as people avoid the town centre due to the traffic chaos.