From BBC
ShareSave
BBC North East & Cumbria Investigations
ShareSave
In October 2024 the government announced it was cancelling a project to widen part of the A1 in Northumberland, years after its National Highways agency had spent more than £4m on the purchase of houses and land in the way of the scheme.
The affected families – including one couple who had to start afresh miles away in Cumbria – said they had “been through hell” as they saw their properties “left to rot” unnecessarily.
Melanie Wensby-Scott sat in her car and cried on the day she and her husband left Northgate House, which sits right next to the road not far from Morpeth.
The couple had been packing up the last of their belongings and she was still running the vacuum cleaner around when the agency’s contractors arrived.
“They started boarding up the windows and changing the locks,” she said. “I honestly felt like we were being evicted.”
Melanie and her husband Julian had had “big plans” when they bought the house in 2009.
“We put in a new kitchen, new bathrooms, we were planning a new conservatory and we had no intention of ever leaving,” she said.
But in 2014, the then Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans to dual a 13-mile section of the A1 and it became clear their house was in the path of the chosen route.
“When they first came round I said I didn’t want to move and they basically said I had no option,”
