Filming for the BBC “One Show” on the cycle track on one side of the Timperley bypass.
Shaftsbury Avenue — marked as the Timperley bypass on period maps— features wide cycle tracks and footways for some lengths but cyclists were also clearly supposed to use service roads, too, a common feature of some period cycle tracks.
“Tenders are invited for the construction of the [Timperley] by-pass approximately 2,000 lineal yards in length,” advertised the county surveyor in December 1937. (2,000 yards is 1.83kms.)
“The works include the construction of a concrete carriageway, ballasted service road, cycle tracks, footpath, bridge over the Cheshire Lines Railway, culvert to Fairywell Brook,” continued the advert.
The wide cycle track on the Timperley bypass is still well used by cyclists.
A housing plot advert in the Manchester Evening News of March 1939 said the finished house would be “fronting new bypass road.” However, a BBC Peoples’ War memory from an evacuee described the bypass as “unfinished” in September 1939.
The bypass and its cycle track was certainly in use ten years later when H. Downs of Stretford, a “cyclist who covers many hundreds of miles a year,” complained about the “so-called cycle track on the by-pass road from Altrincham to the roundabout at the junction of Stockport-Altrincham and Brooklands roads.”
A 1960 photograph in the Francis Frith collection shows the Timperley bypass cycle track with “Cyclists Only” signs on both sides of the road.
Another photograph of the same year shows the good condition of the wide cycle track and adjacent footway.
