COMMUTERS and locals on Bournemouth's busiest road face months of hold-ups when work begins on roads serving a major new shopping park.

Preliminary work around Bournemouth's Castle Lane West begins on Monday, with Bournemouth council pledging that disruption will be kept to a minimum.

But the main phase of the work - which runs from February to autumn 2006 - is set to cause major headaches as the junction built for the nearby Castlepoint shopping centre is torn up and replaced with a roundabout.

Strouden Park councillor Bron Littlewood told the Daily Echo: "Residents have already been through the nightmare of the last lot and now they're going to have to go through it again."

The town's Yellow Buses depot on Mallard Road is to be turned into a shopping park whose tenants will include Homebase and the curtain superstore Paul Simon.

The scheme was to have been built at the same time as Castlepoint but was delayed by planning objections and the government's decision to make one of the bus sheds a listed building.

As a result of the delay, the Castlepoint project went ahead separately, with a major new junction replacing the roundabout where Mallard Road meets Castle Lane West.

Now that junction will itself be torn up - and replaced with a signal-controlled roundabout.

Throop and Muscliff councillor Ron Whittaker said: "They're paying about £1.25 million to put back exactly what was there before but with lights and everything else."

Cllr Bron Littlewood added: "They took away the roundabout that was there and they're going to put it back again.

"We're totally in disagreement with what they're doing on that site. We need a Homebase there like we need a hole in the head."

Mike Emsley, spokesman for the Mallard Road Company's public relations firm Aylesworth Fleming, said the new shops should be built by the end of 2006 and trading in 2007.

He said the new junction would be a gyratory system similar to the one proposed in 1999, when the Castlepoint and Mallard Road schemes were put forward together.

The work which gets under way next week will involve power companies and BT diverting their services and will mainly affect verges and footpaths. It will be carried out at off-peak times.

A letter sent by Bournemouth Borough Council to residents says the work could lead to "periods of disruption to traffic, pedestrians and residents".

It added: "However, every effort will be made to ensure that any disruption is kept to a minimum and that acceptable safety standards are maintained at all times."

First published: October 13