This text is provided by Durham County Record Office

Responsibility for highways has for centuries been the responsibility of the county. For 300 years before the advent of the County Council, the Quarter Sessions was looked to to provide for the upkeep of county roads. Lesser roads were the concern of each parish, but the Justices of the Peace sitting in the Quarter Sessions were charged with keeping the parish officials to their duty. In 1889 the County Council took over 320 miles of county roads and county bridges. William Crozier, junior, was the first County Surveyor and Architect with a salary of £400 per annum. The first year's budget of the Works Committee was £33,150 including £19,000 to be spent on the upkeep of main roads and £1,650 on the maintenance of bridges.

By 1939 the Council was responsible for 1544 miles of road including trunk roads on an agency basis from the Ministry of Transport. The 1930s saw extensive improvements to the roads of County Durham, including dual carriageway on the Old North Road immediately south of Merryoaks in Durham City and the construction of the two miles of the Chester-le-Street by-pass. The old level crossing at Teams was eliminated by placing the colliery company's railway in a tunnel under the road and Houghton Cut was widened with 50,000 tons of limestone rock being excavated. Particularly spectacular was the new vertical lift bridge over the Tees between Billingham and Middlesbrough, jointly constructed by Durham County Council and Middlesbrough Corporation and the first of its type to be built in the country.

Construction of Houghton Cut

Construction of dual carriageway at Merryoaks

The three miles of new road approaching this bridge from the north was designed to provide the southern section of the east coast road from Middlesbrough to South Shields.

After the Second World War the department expanded under the guidance of Basil Cotton, who became County Engineer in 1948 and much work on designs for necessary road improvements was done in the 1950s. This design work came to fruition in the 1960s after the White Paper associated with Lord Hailsham provided £50 million to be spent on road improvements in the county over the five years from 1964. These included the by-passing of Gateshead, Darlington and Sedgefield and the construction of the Durham Motorway, seen at the time of its opening as the greatest improvement in communications since the railway era more than a century before. The A689 and the A690, in the eastern part of the county, were extensively improved at the same time. In the late 1960s the Direct Labour Organisation completed the Seaham, Seaton and Easington by-passes on the A19 trunk road.

By the end of the sixties, therefore, the county had acquired two major trunk roads running north to south and connecting the large centres of population of Newcastle and Darlington and Sunderland and Middlesbrough. Similarly, the more important of the roads running east to west had been improved.

Major capital road schemes have begun to attract funds from the European Commission and recently new roads have been funded by grants from the European Regional Development Fund and grants from the central government of the United Kingdom.

Major schemes completed in the 1970s and 1980s included bypasses for Shildon, Bishop Auckland, Heighington, Leadgate, Annfield Plain, Pelton, Bowes and Darlington.

Major route improvements have been carried out between Sedgefield and Cleveland along the A689 and A177. Work is currently being undertaken in by passing Coundon and Wheatley Hill. In the next few years bypasses are planned for Middleton St. George, Consett, Newton Cap and Toronto, Toft Hill , West Auckland, Witton Gilbert and Durham City.

A new Darlington cross-town route which follows the old line of the railway from Stockton to Darlington is planned. This route is designed to link the A66 with the A1(M) at Burtree.

Building of the A1(M)

Expenditure by the County Council on the upkeep of roads and bridges has risen from £33,150 in 1889/90, the first year of the Council's life, to £1,267,344 in 1939 and to £28,659,414 in the year 1989/90. Similarly the 320 miles of county road inherited by the County Council in 1889 has risen to the 2,500 miles of roads currently maintained by the council in 1989.