It is doubtful that motorists caught up in one of Oxford’s worst traffic nightmares earlier this month could think very far beyond the monstrous ‘fatberg’ lurking in a city sewer off Frideswide Square.


Work to clear a build-up of baby wipes and cooking fat, it seemed, proved enough to cause a build-up of traffic stretching from Park End Street back to Abingdon.


Commuters complained that five- minute drives were being turned into journeys of well over an hour. You half expected to see “Oxford closed until further notice” signs to greet you on the main arterial routes into the city.
But now we learn that an altogether bigger scheme is coming into view on the not very distant horizon — with the long- awaited revamp of Frideswide Square being brought forward to the autumn.


The news will cause many to wonder if such chaos resulted from repair work to a sewer pipe, what is going happen when they start building new roundabouts in Frideswide Square?

The misery caused by fatberg lasted a week, and, let’s not forget, a week when school holidays meant traffic levels were about half of what they would normally be. The Frideswide scheme is expected to last 12 months.


If this were not all worrying enough, the Frideswide work will coincide with the start of work at the Westgate Centre, with the Westgate multi-storey car park to be demolished early next year — no doubt resulting in thousands of truck journeys along Abingdon Road to remove waste.
Clearly, we are all going to be at the mercy of county council planners who now face a major challenge to keep the city moving, while substantial parts of its centre are being rebuilt.

County Hall reassures us that it will have more time to plan traffic management for the square than it had when faced with the sewer problem — with more space available for solutions and the needs of those using the roads.


County council leader, Ian Hudspeth, is wise to accept that disruption is inevitable — with a price having to be paid to finally fix Frideswide Square and expand and redevelop Westgate.


But what many people today will be wondering is just how much pain lies ahead from this autumn — and then throughout 2015.
Let’s hope those putting plans in place found themselves stuck in traffic earlier this month — because it is unpleasant to imagine that the fatberg is just a taste of what may be to come.