August 28, 1965 A shanty town of wooden shacks, caravans and temporary brick buildings appeared alongside Kingston bypass at Malden.

It was the centre of the £1.5m scheme to build flyovers at the Shannon Corner and Merton Spur junctions of the bypass.

In those wooden buildings all the planning and administration of the huge undertaking was carried out.

It was a two-year scheme and every stage of the project was planned down to the last day.

Complicated graphs and maps lined the walls of the buildings and energetic young administrators supervised the work from improvised offices.

For the men behind the scheme there was a challenge and a lot of hard work. For the men on the job there was a lot of hard work and a fat pay packet.

The scheme had to be finished by the spring of 1967 and there was no room for slackers.

Though Surrey County Council engineers were supervising the scheme it was the Essex firm of W and C French Ltd that was to make the flyovers reality.

Agent Graham Pace said: “We got off to a very good start with good weather. We are right on time.”

All those concerned with the plan had been very co-operative to date, he said.

Work was divided into three stages. Slip roads were built to allow construction of the Merton Spur flyover as part of stage one, which began on February 1.

The second would see the completion of that flyover and the Shannon Corner road was to be built during the final stage, after May 1966.

There were nearly 150 men employed on the project.

50 YEARS AGO: August 28, 1965 Worcester Park shoppers were set for a dull Christmas after lack of support from traders meant plans to install seasonal lights in the high street were abandoned. Each trader would have had to shell out £10 for the proposed illuminations, which were to have been brightly-lit ornaments attached to lampposts.

25 YEARS AGO: August 31, 1990 Draughtsman Brian Talbot’s faith in humanity was restored when an eagle-eyed resident found his stolen artificial leg in a back garden. Disabled since the 1970s, he could have been completely immobilised by the theft. But the prosthetic turned up undamaged in Mount Pleasant Road, New Malden.

10 YEARS AGO: August 31, 2005 As Kingston Council responded with a resounding “yes” to the first requests from supermarkets, pubs, bars and restaurants to increase the hours they could sell alcohol, residents threatened legal action unless their objections were heeded. Of the borough’s 450 licensed premises, 410 had applied.