Post-war and beyond
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It was in the frenzy of construction in the decades that followed the Second World War that the idea of building miles of new road within London began to look more realistic. After all, that's very much what the 1950s and 60s were about: pouring as much concrete as humanly possible, not just to reconstruct a battered and crumbling nation, but to turn it into something entirely new and rather thrilling.
It was almost inevitable that, in all the excitement, the plans seemed to continually grow in size. Abercrombie's stately parkways and roundabouts didn't last long when pitted against multi-lane elevated roads and swooping free-flow interchanges.
A change of plan
With the ink still drying on Abercrombie's County of London Plan and Greater London Plan, the highway engineers of the 1950s were rapidly discovering that his proposals were out of line with the astronomical traffic growth that was projected for the coming years. As a result they were forced to begin making amendments to deal with modern traffic predictions.
The first key change was in the function of the proposed ring roads. By the mid-1950s, it was proposed that the motorway-standard ring for fast traffic would be the A-Ring, not the B-Ring. The A-Ring was re-routed onto an entirely new alignment, and restricted to a very small number of junctions at Angel, Aldgate, Abbey Street, Old Kent Road, Kennington Park Road, Vauxhall, Victoria, Montagu Square and Tottenham Court Road.
The 1950s motorway A-Ring. Note the Montagu Square spur pointing to the M1. Click to enlarge
This turned out only to be an interim plan. It was made in good faith as a serious proposal (as detailed at Pathetic Motorways), but it was very quickly turned down on grounds of cost: land values that close to the central area were already prohibitively high, and in the race to reconstruct war-torn London, no land had been reserved, especially not for this entirely new alignment. In addition, the A-Ring plan had required radial routes to be extended right in to meet it, including one discussion about whether the M1 (then in planning as the London-Yorkshire Motorway) could be extended parallel to the Edgware Road to terminate at the Montagu Square junction near Marble Arch. This sort of roadbuilding was clearly not viable.
By the late 1950s, the London County Council was attempting to inject its proposals with a dose of realism. No ring road could be built so close to the central area of London. Instead, the A-Ring and B-Ring were scrapped, and in their place the London Motorway Box was born. An inner circuit, following surface railway routes, was the closest the bulldozers would get, creating a trapezoidal motorway via Willesden, Highbury, Hackney, Woolwich, Blackheath, Brixton, Clapham Junction and Shepherd's Bush (shown left, click to enlarge). Land further out was cheaper, and the motorway would be less disruptive if built along existing railway routes. Here was something that really stood a chance.
The Box incorporated some existing road proposals: the LCC seem to have already been planning a new road to aid regeneration in the East End, connecting the Blackwall Tunnel to the A12 Eastern Avenue. This road, already at an advanced stage in planning, was drafted in to form the eastern flank of the Box. And away from central London, Abercrombie's C-Ring and D-Ring survived, their specifications now upped to motorway standard. London's epic road plan had just been born.
Surging into the sixties
In the first years of the 1960s, the LCC was busily working away on its latest motorway proposals, but for the time being was keeping quiet about them.
Its annual reports from 1959 and 1960, for example, both include diagrams indicating road improvements in the central area - but they carefully omit anything to do with the Motorway Box. Instead, the LCC marked its strategic roads, a selection of city streets that it grouped into cross-city routes for through traffic, with names like the North Cross Route, South-West Cross Route, and so on (shown right; click to enlarge). The new road linking Blackwall and the A12 was a new alignment for the East Cross Route. It seems incredible that official documents could just ignore such major schemes, especially when some of them had the exact same names. The four sides of the Motorway Box had, by now, been dubbed the North, South, East and West Cross Routes.
It's possible to gauge development of the Box plans very accurately: in April 1962, consulting engineers were submitting an interim report on the second stage of the West Cross Route, which was to run from Holland Park Avenue to the King's Road. Even at this early stage the design of the northern section, Westway to Holland Park Avenue, had been completed and was waiting to be put out to tender. In other words, the Westway and section of West Cross Route linking it to Holland Park Avenue had been planned and designed by the end of 1961. But still it was kept under wraps.
It was first discovered that something was being planned in about 1964 in the most bizarre of circumstances. Battersea Borough Council wanted to build a swimming bath, but couldn't get planning permission.
"The fact came out under persistent questioning that the then London County Council was sitting on plans for a vast network of motorway rings round London, a section of which would sweep through the site where the baths might be."
New Society, 1 August 1968
This was alarming news, not just because no motorway had ever been built this close to the centre of London before. The Council had never mentioned it was dreaming up anything of the kind - let alone that it had started protecting the alignment of its new highways.
Coming together
The London County Council didn't have much time to explain itself, being replaced in 1965 with a new body, the Greater London Council. There is an argument (in fact, there is a whole book) to the effect that the GLC's main purpose was to plan a strategic road network for London, and that all else was simply incidental. If this is true then it carried out its assigned task with some considerable gusto. The Act of Parliament that created the GLC stipulated that it was to produce a Greater London Development Plan (GLDP), part of which would be proposals for a strategic road network, and so for the next five years the GLC set about planning roads like never before.
The GLC's planners and engineers worked feverishly, first fleshing out the LCC's network with radial routes and alignments, then giving zippy new names to it all: out went the Motorway Box and the C-Ring, in came Ringway 1, Ringway 2, Ringway 3. Treasury documents from the period show that the engineering staff at the GLC were utterly overwhelmed by the amount of work as it became necessary to plan each motorway in real detail, selecting alignments and drawing up engineering plans. Millions of pounds were spent on consultants' reports for the many areas that the GLC could not deal with alone.
Ringway 1 outline plan, published 1966
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A whole raft of new terminology crept in. Abercrombie's names were discarded wholesale and terse memos were dispatched to anyone old-fashioned enough to refer to "Radial Route 7" instead of M12 or "D-Ring" where Ringway 3 was de rigeur.
In 1966, the London Motorway Box went public, and Ringway 1 was unveiled for the press. It was followed by Ringway 2 in 1969. The Ministry of Transport, which took responsibility for roads in the outer area and many of the existing radial routes, was still working on plans for Ringway 3, and even came up with its own idea, Ringway 4, with which the GLC had no involvement. (The latter was descended from Bressey and Lutyens' North and South Orbital Roads.)
Despite all this thundering progress, in 1969, at the time when the Ringways were probably closer to being built than at any time before or since, the public was left in the dark:
"...no further news is known of Ringway 2, apart from that released by the G.L.C. a few weeks ago - which still leaves the exact route undecided, the starting date unknown, and the position of the interlocking traffic exchanges with other motorways still unlocated!
"A Ministry spokesman said this week: 'All this is information in the keeping of Greater London Council'."
Wandsworth Boro' News, 15 August 1969
Wandsworth Boro' News, 15 August 1969
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There is nothing unusual or noteworthy about this particular event: right across London, residents and businesses were becoming frustrated by the lack of information. The GLC, keen to prevent vested interests from getting hold of the plans for their own ends, were beginning to alienate the people they most needed on their side.
A comprehensive plan
As the deadline for the GLDP came closer, the plans for the strategic road network began to form a coherent overall picture. In the past, the Royal Commission, Bressey and Lutyens and Abercrombie had all formed road proposals, but the GLC went a step further: it drew up a firm idea of how the road network could be achieved.
Artist's impression of the North Cross Route passing below Highbury Corner
Where before there had just been a map of London with a selection of carefully chosen lines, the GLC's planners could tell you which sections would be completed by 1980 and which were "post-1991". They knew which would require three lanes and which needed four. They could tell you which interchanges were primary and which secondary. They decided where routes should be safeguarded and drew up detailed diagrams to decide which buildings would have to be demolished and which would survive. They set up numerous study groups and commissioned all manner of consultant's reports to plot routes, junction layouts and traffic flow data.
The question that was always avoided was that of cost. Ringway 1, the route probably planned in greatest detail, only had a hazy estimate of the expenditure involved and for most of the other routes the question was not raised. With hindsight, it seems that the planners might have hindered their own efforts in being so secretive and evasive, because the lack of answers only fuelled speculation. In 1966, the Evening Standard claimed Ringway 1 alone would cost £3000m and involve evicting 90,000 people. Their estimates were about three times the size of the real numbers, but no official information was available to counter the scaremongering.
All the same, the plan had a respectable level of public support as Ringway 1 was announced in 1966. The boroughs affected by the route were co-operative. Lambeth was keen on establishing better transport links with the south, with which it had no direct rail connection. Camden's only concern was that the section of the North Cross Route passing through its boundaries might not be big enough, and wrote to the GLC recommending seven lanes in each direction instead of four. For a time it looked like the Ringways were going to succeed - but it wasn't to last.
