IT was the sort of response that makes you smile.

Back in the 1920s Worcester City Council decided to make historic but narrow New Street one way in an effort to bring some order to the city’s rapidly deteriorating traffic flow. So not a lot changes.

But in those days the street was one of the main areas where local waggoners stabled their horses. The sunset of the horse and cart era was fast approaching as new-fangled automobiles took over, but carts and wagons were still a popular way to reach rural villages.

Most of the inns in New Street had stables and they were where the slow-moving but colourful waggonettes, as they were known, returned at the end of the day. It was a part of local life that had gone on for centuries.

Which meant the imposition of a one-way system didn’t go down well.

Indeed it wasn’t long before there was an incident. One evening an old waggoner was peacefully clip-clopping his way home to the stables at the Old Greyhound when he suddenly found an enthusiastic young policeman barring his way.

“Don’t you know this is now a one-way street?” the officer demanded.

“Of course I do,” the old man replied. “But I only be going one way. Gee Up!”

The result was probably Worcester Magistrates first case of driving the wrong way along a one-way street. There have been a few more since then.

In times before the bus and lorry the ”county carriers” provided a vital lifeline for ordinary villagers and country folk, those who could not afford their own pony and trap let alone a horse-drawn carriage.

The carriers were enterprising individuals or families who ran regular, timetabled horse and cart services to ferry passengers and goods between villages or to and from towns and cities.

All services started and ended at an inn and as late as 1908 there were still 134 carriers – 40 of them women – operating horse and cart services from Worcester to the surrounding villages.

The arrival of the carrier’s horse and cart was the main event of the day for many an outlying village. On market day, with an early morning start, the carrier took the village folk into town on his cart packed between pots of fruit and vegetables and squawking poultry.

On the return trip in the late afternoon, he brought his passengers back, loaded up with new shoes, parcels of clothes and other items purchased in town.

The journeys were unhurried both ways, but homebound trips were usually even more leisurely with passengers and goods being carefully set down and deliveries made to people who had put in orders.

In fact, progress was sometimes so slow that passengers in a hurry would get off and walk.

Sound familiar to anyone stuck in a traffic jam today? Seems everything changes, but nothing changes.