Who was Thomas Lewis of Thomas Lewis Way?

Opened in 1989, the busy stretch of the A335 that is Thomas Lewis Way was originally conceived as something much grander: designs were drawn up by planners for the M272, a sweeping motorway spur punching its way from the M27 into the heart of Southampton, a twin for the M271 to the west. But after years of heated arguments, contested planning and shifting attitudes towards driving urban motorways into city centres, the intimidating multi-lane vision for the later cancelled M272 was set aside in favour of a more modest non-motorway standard single carriageway designed to relieve the burden on the traffic-choked Portswood area. Thomas Lews Way sign (Image: Archives)

When it came to naming this vital new link road, the city that had decided against leaving its mark in grey tarmac and blue signs chose not to honour royalty or ancient nobility in the naming of the road, but to immortalise a working-class hero who had dedicated his life to the people of Southampton. Thomas "Tommy" Lewis was born in 1873 in the crowded, poverty-stricken St Mary's district, the son of a dock labourer from Jersey. Raised in the brutal reality of Victorian poverty, from the age of 11 he worked as an apprentice watchmaker.

But it was not clockwork that would define his life, but the struggle for social justice. A committed champion of workers' rights, Tommy threw himself into the local labour movement, helping to found grassroots dockworkers' unions, shop assistants' unions and seafarers' unions, leading challenges against the strong and powerful shipping magnates of the day and leading a breakaway seafarers' union to ensure better conditions for merchant sailors. It was a start to a political career that would redraw the map of the southern port city: in 1901, Tommy caused waves by being elected Southampton's very first Labour Party councillor, representing the same St Mary's ward in which he grew up.

Thomas Lewis (Image: Archives) It was the start of sixty years of public service on the borough council, with Tommy proving a doughty and popular representative - but his ambitions soon strayed beyond the council chamber. After two decades of struggling to find the funds for a successful campaign, in 1929 Tommy Lewis once again made history when he was elected Southampton's first Labour Member of Parliament, taking his fight for the working classes all the way to the House of Commons.

Thomas Lewis died in 1962, but the city never forgot the watchmaker who spent his life fighting for the poorest of his home town.

With the newly built Portswood bypass opening in the late 1980s, naming the road in honour of Tommy Lewis was a fitting tribute for the man who had helped the city navigate six decades of profound change - and when the new route was opened in the summer of 1988, thousands of local people took to streets to take part in a mass streetside party in celebration of the new road.

Thomas Lewis Way today stands not just as a vital transport corridor, but a permanent miles-long monument to a local lad who spent his lifetime fighting to lift the everyday people of Southampton up.