Crumbling flyover 'should be demolished by May'

A crumbling flyover should be mostly demolished by May, a council leader has said, one year on from its closure.

The A167 Gateshead Highway flyover, which dates to the 1960s, was suddenly closed in December 2024 due to safety concerns.

Last month a report, obtained by the BBC, said a special type of inspection, considered vital for predicting and preventing structural collapse in this particular design of road, had not been conducted since 1996.

Leader Martin Gannon said he wanted the flyover down "as rapidly as possible" but said there was still significant uncertainty over whether a repeat of the Metro shutdown would be needed.

The council has argued that the flyover had a regular maintenance and inspection regime, which did identify the problem that led to its closure.

It said contractors BAM had cleared trees from either side of the flyover last week, ahead of the demolition work.

The removal of the flyover itself is now expected to start in the new year, after the neighbouring Computer House is torn down.

While the Metro chaos that ensued in the weeks following the flyover's closure was resolved by the start of this year, roads around the town centre have continued suffer.

Gannon said he regularly receives reports that a once five-minute journey over the flyover, which previously carried about 40,000 vehicles a day, was "now taking 45 minutes".

While the road beneath should open again once the structure is demolished, Gannon said he did not want the town to become a "rat run" for people travelling into Newcastle from further south of the River Tyne.

He added: "We do not want to encourage people who are currently using the A1 - that is the right road to use if you are coming from south of Gateshead and going to Newcastle or north.

"The new road will not have the same capacity as this existing four-lane highway which goes from nowhere to nowhere," he continued.

To mark a year since it was shut down, Liberal Democrat opposition councillors unveiled a sponge substitute for the crumbling A167 highway.

As he cut into the icing on Friday, leader Ron Beadle urged the Labour-led council to "get on" with the job of tearing it down.

"We are doing this because in March, the leader of Gateshead Council said the flyover would be gone by the end of the year. And it is one year on and nothing is gone," he said.

Gannon had previously suggested that the flyover would be gone by the end of the year, although local authority officials indicated at the time that a likelier timescale would be 12 months from those comments he made in March.

He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service he believed that delay was "not unusual" and that the flyover was ultimately closed "because we did not want to take any risks" after another inspection of its concrete pillars revealed safety concerns.

He said the target of having most of the flyover removed in May was "ambitious", particularly given "the complexity of the works involved".

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