Over the last year I have gone from dreading roundabouts (and cutting off more than my fair share of people by taking the roundabout in the wrong way) to loving roundabouts.

I think Canada should SERIOUSLY consider roundabouts in new urban planning. They are so much more efficient for low and medium traffic locations than stop signs (and the eliminate those ridiculous rolling stop tickets).

That is until I met a roundabout that has gone too far, the magic roundabout in Swindon.

Until September 1972, there was only one Magic Roundabout and it was a children’s television programme featuring Dougal the dog, a hippy rabbit called Dylan and the spring-loaded Zebedee.

Then a revolutionary idea (in more ways than one) which had been tested in Colchester, Essex, was also tested on Swindon’s County Ground Roundabout. Until then the area had been a motorist’s nightmare which routinely failed to handle the volume of traffic which converged on it from five directions.

The new roundabout was the work of the Road Research Laboratory (RRL) and their solution was brilliantly simple.

All they did was combine two roundabouts in one – the first the conventional, clockwise variety and the second, which revolved inside the first, sending traffic anti-clockwise.

And magic it certainly is. Though it may confuse or amuse new visitors and baffle American tourists, the average Swindonian finds that his or her passage through one of the town’s busiest junctions is actually quite fluid, even at peak times. Twenty-five years on, the Magic Roundabout still works, despite ever-increasing volumes of traffic.

As I almost ripped the back wheel off my car on the weekend, I was in a rental and without my TomTom which was conveniently located in the glove compartment of my towed away car. So last night I went through the magic roundabout to a meeting without guidance and I got lost, honked at and definitely did not feel like a happy ‘Swindonian’. I talked to a few of my peers after the meeting and they all laughed ‘We knew you would get lost, just glad you eventually got there’.

I also stopped to take this picture with my phone. Who would have thought?