"The most astonishing and destructive thing never to happen to London," says the man who has spent twenty years researching the first true map of the unbuilt Ringways.
One thing I adore about Chris’ work and self-maintained website is that it’s such a brilliantly personal and enthusiastically singular vision of what was good about the internet. There’s no clout chasing or viral strategy, he just wanted a thing to exist that spreads knowledge with a sense of humour and human writing. His work has ensured it has endured for two decades. I’ve been reading it for most of that time and borrowed heavily from it for my university dissertation on unbuilt roads and it’s just a joy to see something done for the hell of it.
This is such an astute observation. Like you I’ve dipped into Chris’s work for a long time (once the CBRD, I think?) and @Chris, if I remember rightly, you once wrote about how your interest started with your face pressed against the car window whilst your Dad drove you around. I think about this often when dragging my son on car journeys, and what fascinations they might trigger. The website is an engrossing, unique and special thing - just what the internet should be, and it’s great to see it covered here.
Tremendous stuff on the Ringways. I’ve long had a bit about how cars don’t really work in London because so much of the city’s layout is millennia older than the infernal combustion engine, and this is also an interesting example of how that’s true.
These days I increasingly think that the private motorcar should be banned inside the north circular* and the city pedestrianised from Archway to the imperial war museum, and from
Notting Hill Gate to the Tower. We have the public transport infrastructure to make this work.
Similarly, I have always been interested in this. The excellent Jay Foreman did a great video on this many years ago which you can see on YouTube. https://youtu.be/yUEHWhO_HdY?si=YtdFyGx6vkQ6_kBR
Jay’s video is great and includes a piece of real insight which I love - he points out how the roads would have shaped the way we think about the shape of London. Today we talk about the M25 as if it’s the boundary of London and we refer to places by which travel card zone they’re in - if the boundaries had been as physical and obvious as this we’d all be talking about places being “just inside Ringway 2” etc.
This is true, I wouldn't for a moment suggest that the massive freeway systems typical of American cities result in a successful urban transport strategy even there.
It's not just the failure of urban transport; as you know from reading about Robert Moses, these urban highway projects in America were deployed as a tool to destroy nonwhite and immigrant neighborhoods, and where they came in they tore the souls out of those cities. Detroit was dealt a fatal blow and has never recovered. Chicago fared a little better but was badly wounded, as London would have been. I live in a city where the Black and Jewish and Italian neighborhoods were all demolished in favor of interstate highways. Sixty years later it's a former city, and we're still trying to dig ourselves out of that hole.
I hope my comment didn't come across as too harsh, because I think this is important and vital! But sometimes I worry that people in other countries may romanticize America's so-called "car culture" and think it works for us, or the rules are different here, and that's just how America is. But it was imposed on us, from above, by people with an agenda that had nothing to do with cars.
Jane Jacobs' 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' sheds great light on this lunacy, the Ringway project heavily influenced by the works of Robert Moses in New York. Like Corbusier, Moses tended to oversimplify the human element of city life - the utter chaos he brought to New York's traffic system finally halted after demolishing the grand old masterpiece of Penn Station. Had he been allowed to continue razing districts, Moses would have eventually demolished the SoHo and Greenwich Village districts in favour of another expressway, presaging the lunacy of the Ringway.
As with all English imitations of American influences, ours was to be cheaper and more sinister (the layered, ablative facade of Southwyck House was designed to attenuate traffic sounds - the homes of nearly 150 families used as a living sound barrier).
Mercifully, the Ringway remains a horror for another age (though readers who regularly drive through Blackwall to Hackney via Eastcross may note that the A102 from Kidbrooke also has a section along Wick Road).
Really brilliant to shine a light on this! It's an interesting contrast to the story of New York I was introduced to by the recent 99pi podcast series rereading Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, 'The Power Broker.'
I spent a year of my life wading through the 700-odd very dense pages of The Power Broker which feels like a sort of hazing ritual, so I would definitely take a podcast version of it. (A few days after I finished it I read an interview with Donald Trump who claimed it was his favourite book ever, to which I go and how many chapters on Long Island freeways did you read.)
I listened to the podcast series too, and as a result I’m three quarters of the way through the Power Broker now. It might be one of the best things I’ve ever read.
Still unsure if it really is the greatest book ever, as certain men claim, or if once you’ve finished something that long we all feel the need to praise it or look silly. Could’ve done with an edit is all I’m saying.*
*applies to 98% of written word pieces in any format
Apparently when he first delivered it to the publisher they said it was too big to bind into a single volume and if he wanted it to be one physical book he had to make some cuts. He then took out 300,000 words. So in some ways we were lucky.
Annoyingly - and most relevantly to this article- two chapters which didn't take the cut were about times when Moses was defeated; once in his plan to build a new ballpark for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and more importantly, when Jane Jacobs led opposition to his plans for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which has similar 'I can't believe they were contemplating that' vibes.
Jacobs' campaign began a few years after the Cross-Bronx Expressway started to be built, when the dislocation became clear (and the naked power play of those with it and those without it). That echoes the Ringways project, where Londoners had enough experience of what the Westway had wrought to begin to fight back. The linked elements would seem to be the general decline in deference to The Man (be he from the Ministry of Transport or the local council or the large corporation) combined with the fact that the cheap Victorian houses were being bought up by new graduates who were forming a bohemian middle class across the city, who had connections that belied their bohemianism, and the backgrounds and education to understand how this was a fight that could now be won.
Much more fun to read the work of his greatest hater Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a genuinely enjoyable read, partly because of how strongly Jacobs’ scorn for Moses and her other enemies drips off the page.
As someone living in Bethnal Green currently fighting to keep our LTN which the council wants to rip out, it's a relief that the plans to put a massive motorway right on my doorstep never happened. And linking to another of your stories Jim, it would probably have been a lot harder to make so much out of music festivals in Victoria Park if there had been the planned road building through the middle of it!
Thanks Jim and Chris for a great report - here’s a small addition about the rather ignominious end.
The Ringway plans were publicly abandoned by GLC Labour with no big press conference, but announced to a couple of reporters standing outside a block of flats on the eve of a Wandsworth by-election in June 1972.
Sir Reg Goodwin, opposition leader, pledged that Labour would drop the plans if they took control of the GLC in April 1973 - which they then did.
I was there for the Standard, and had covered the Ringways story with columnist Simon Jenkins - who had the foresight to predict in 1969 that the Motorway Box would never be built because of cost.
Eventually opposition to the plans made them a political liability. If Chris’s plan had been available at the time I think they would have been dropped earlier.
Sir Reg said that if built a motorway would pass within 20 ft of third floor flats in Gaitskell Court, Battersea. I guess we might now check the accuracy of that.
Absolutely brilliant to hear about you being there to report on the plan's death David - I can imagine London Centric would have been wall-to-wall Ringways if it had been around there.
And I think Sir Reg's claim looks like it checks out based on Chris' map?
After Labour took control of the GLC in 1973, and scrapped the Ringways, they reckoned 10,000 homes would be saved. They estimated 100,000 people were affected directed or through proximity to planned motorways.
If anyone remembers the BBC show The Secret History of our Streets from c. 15 years ago, they had a great episode about slum clearance and preparing the city for the 20th century, focussing on Deptford IIRC. As this piece notes, houses they were trying to condemn now incredibly valuable.
The properties in the way of the motorways were bought up and left empty for ages until local housing campaigners set up a scheme to let them out to homeless families while the authorities wrangled. My dad worked on getting the properties habitable again.
The East Cross Route adjacent to Victoria Park and south to the Blackwall Tunnell WAS built and destroyed much of Poplar. The borough was bisected and it deeply affected community life. My understanding is that Tower Hamlets was one of few boroughs that was willing to implement the proposals - I guess it made more sense in the context of the second Blackwall Tunnel being opened.
I have read about public protests on Cadogan Terrace who wanted a bypass as the Blackwall Tunnel traffic was killing pedestrians/children crossing the road. It would be great to read more detail about this (eg the local feeling for and against) both here and for the few other instances of Ringway sections being built.
One reason the East Cross Route was built was that, like the Westway, it predated the Ringways system and was already well advanced in planning by the time the GLC was created. Generally speaking the only urban motorways the GLC built were planned before the Ringways in an era when there was less opposition at a public and political level.
Early drafts of the urban motorway plan for London had *another* East Cross Route motorway parallel to it, crossing the Thames near Rotherhithe, which was removed from the plan as an economy on the basis that the Blackwall Tunnel Northern and Southern Approaches were already in the planning process.
Thanks Chris for your excellent work. You may know the story of how childen’s play in the rubble of Westway construction in the 1960's eventually led to some beneficial development of the land beneath the motorway.
The original plans, in the spirit of the times, were for car parking, and it took four years of campaigning by the local community to achieve a change of heart. https://connections.commons.london/category/northken/
When I was taking my 4 year Business Studies Course in the early 70s at the Polytechnic of Central London, now the University of Westminster, I did my thesis on whether the 3 Ring Routes should happen. Sadly the finished document is no more but I remember my conclusion that they would never happen!
Super article - but I don’t think it’s been forgotten. Certainly by those who value the environment. And those of us who were involved in the campaign to protect Oxleas Wood from the motorway brigade took this as inspiration.
It truly is a horror story, but, having said that the entire transport system is like a Daisy - everything leading you to the centre.
What we really, really need is an equivalent Elizabeth Line linking SE London to SW London. And extending the Lizzie line to Dartford and Bromley to kick start the economies of those towns along the way. Invest in trains and not in roads.
That already exists - Overground. Just needs some service frequency increases and a station interchange put in in Brixton - TFL bought the building under the railway line only last week.
A linked project defeated by successful protests was demolishing Covent Garden and extending the Barbican deck system all the way to Piccadilly so cars would go below and people walk above. Again, many areas saved. I remember a meeting with London planners all those years ago when we suggested the Covent Garden central market could become a tourist market, and planners said "nonsense", it had to be demolished. Joseph Hanlon
My grandparents and great grandparents and aunts and uncles lived in Swinbrook Road W10 for decades, compulsorily purchased for the construction of the Westway. While by all accounts it was very run down, the scattering of the family to all boroughs and towns as a consequence, fractured a close knit group.
Fascinating and horrifying! Your years of dedication to researching this is truly impressive and appreciated. During my early childhood a major ringways plan was drawn up for Eastcote , middx - a quiet metroland suburb. The D ring, as it was called, would have swept away swathes of 1930’s housing including ours. I believe my dad was very active in organising protest against this and spoke at many public meetings. It was to be a link to the M1 but thankfully was scrapped.
Moving to Glasgow mid 70’s my dad again found himself protesting against another motorway plan which would have seen our home demolished. Using his experience from Eastcote he was able to help squash this ill thought out plan.
One thing I adore about Chris’ work and self-maintained website is that it’s such a brilliantly personal and enthusiastically singular vision of what was good about the internet. There’s no clout chasing or viral strategy, he just wanted a thing to exist that spreads knowledge with a sense of humour and human writing. His work has ensured it has endured for two decades. I’ve been reading it for most of that time and borrowed heavily from it for my university dissertation on unbuilt roads and it’s just a joy to see something done for the hell of it.
This is such an astute observation. Like you I’ve dipped into Chris’s work for a long time (once the CBRD, I think?) and @Chris, if I remember rightly, you once wrote about how your interest started with your face pressed against the car window whilst your Dad drove you around. I think about this often when dragging my son on car journeys, and what fascinations they might trigger. The website is an engrossing, unique and special thing - just what the internet should be, and it’s great to see it covered here.
Tremendous stuff on the Ringways. I’ve long had a bit about how cars don’t really work in London because so much of the city’s layout is millennia older than the infernal combustion engine, and this is also an interesting example of how that’s true.
These days I increasingly think that the private motorcar should be banned inside the north circular* and the city pedestrianised from Archway to the imperial war museum, and from
Notting Hill Gate to the Tower. We have the public transport infrastructure to make this work.
*With exemptions for mobility issues.
Hear hear.
Similarly, I have always been interested in this. The excellent Jay Foreman did a great video on this many years ago which you can see on YouTube. https://youtu.be/yUEHWhO_HdY?si=YtdFyGx6vkQ6_kBR
Jay’s video is great and includes a piece of real insight which I love - he points out how the roads would have shaped the way we think about the shape of London. Today we talk about the M25 as if it’s the boundary of London and we refer to places by which travel card zone they’re in - if the boundaries had been as physical and obvious as this we’d all be talking about places being “just inside Ringway 2” etc.
Great article but one sentence bothers me.
“What works in Detroit or Chicago really doesn’t work in a historic, densely packed British city like London.”
Wrong! It didn't work in Detroit or Chicago either!
https://www.segregationbydesign.com/detroit/i75375
https://www.segregationbydesign.com/chicago/freeways-urban-renewal
This is true, I wouldn't for a moment suggest that the massive freeway systems typical of American cities result in a successful urban transport strategy even there.
It's not just the failure of urban transport; as you know from reading about Robert Moses, these urban highway projects in America were deployed as a tool to destroy nonwhite and immigrant neighborhoods, and where they came in they tore the souls out of those cities. Detroit was dealt a fatal blow and has never recovered. Chicago fared a little better but was badly wounded, as London would have been. I live in a city where the Black and Jewish and Italian neighborhoods were all demolished in favor of interstate highways. Sixty years later it's a former city, and we're still trying to dig ourselves out of that hole.
I hope my comment didn't come across as too harsh, because I think this is important and vital! But sometimes I worry that people in other countries may romanticize America's so-called "car culture" and think it works for us, or the rules are different here, and that's just how America is. But it was imposed on us, from above, by people with an agenda that had nothing to do with cars.
Jane Jacobs' 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' sheds great light on this lunacy, the Ringway project heavily influenced by the works of Robert Moses in New York. Like Corbusier, Moses tended to oversimplify the human element of city life - the utter chaos he brought to New York's traffic system finally halted after demolishing the grand old masterpiece of Penn Station. Had he been allowed to continue razing districts, Moses would have eventually demolished the SoHo and Greenwich Village districts in favour of another expressway, presaging the lunacy of the Ringway.
As with all English imitations of American influences, ours was to be cheaper and more sinister (the layered, ablative facade of Southwyck House was designed to attenuate traffic sounds - the homes of nearly 150 families used as a living sound barrier).
Mercifully, the Ringway remains a horror for another age (though readers who regularly drive through Blackwall to Hackney via Eastcross may note that the A102 from Kidbrooke also has a section along Wick Road).
Really brilliant to shine a light on this! It's an interesting contrast to the story of New York I was introduced to by the recent 99pi podcast series rereading Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, 'The Power Broker.'
I spent a year of my life wading through the 700-odd very dense pages of The Power Broker which feels like a sort of hazing ritual, so I would definitely take a podcast version of it. (A few days after I finished it I read an interview with Donald Trump who claimed it was his favourite book ever, to which I go and how many chapters on Long Island freeways did you read.)
Most read the Power Broker as a cautionary tale of allowing one man absolute power over a place. I suspect Trump read it as an instruction manual.
Like Trump can read anything longer than a McDonalds box.
See David hare's "Straight Line Crazy" next time it comes to town.
I listened to the podcast series too, and as a result I’m three quarters of the way through the Power Broker now. It might be one of the best things I’ve ever read.
Still unsure if it really is the greatest book ever, as certain men claim, or if once you’ve finished something that long we all feel the need to praise it or look silly. Could’ve done with an edit is all I’m saying.*
*applies to 98% of written word pieces in any format
Apparently when he first delivered it to the publisher they said it was too big to bind into a single volume and if he wanted it to be one physical book he had to make some cuts. He then took out 300,000 words. So in some ways we were lucky.
Annoyingly - and most relevantly to this article- two chapters which didn't take the cut were about times when Moses was defeated; once in his plan to build a new ballpark for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and more importantly, when Jane Jacobs led opposition to his plans for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which has similar 'I can't believe they were contemplating that' vibes.
Jacobs' campaign began a few years after the Cross-Bronx Expressway started to be built, when the dislocation became clear (and the naked power play of those with it and those without it). That echoes the Ringways project, where Londoners had enough experience of what the Westway had wrought to begin to fight back. The linked elements would seem to be the general decline in deference to The Man (be he from the Ministry of Transport or the local council or the large corporation) combined with the fact that the cheap Victorian houses were being bought up by new graduates who were forming a bohemian middle class across the city, who had connections that belied their bohemianism, and the backgrounds and education to understand how this was a fight that could now be won.
Much more fun to read the work of his greatest hater Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a genuinely enjoyable read, partly because of how strongly Jacobs’ scorn for Moses and her other enemies drips off the page.
As someone living in Bethnal Green currently fighting to keep our LTN which the council wants to rip out, it's a relief that the plans to put a massive motorway right on my doorstep never happened. And linking to another of your stories Jim, it would probably have been a lot harder to make so much out of music festivals in Victoria Park if there had been the planned road building through the middle of it!
Thanks Jim and Chris for a great report - here’s a small addition about the rather ignominious end.
The Ringway plans were publicly abandoned by GLC Labour with no big press conference, but announced to a couple of reporters standing outside a block of flats on the eve of a Wandsworth by-election in June 1972.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/evening-standard-labours-1972-promise-t/184671622/
Sir Reg Goodwin, opposition leader, pledged that Labour would drop the plans if they took control of the GLC in April 1973 - which they then did.
I was there for the Standard, and had covered the Ringways story with columnist Simon Jenkins - who had the foresight to predict in 1969 that the Motorway Box would never be built because of cost.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/evening-standard-simon-jenkins-predicts/184671826/
Eventually opposition to the plans made them a political liability. If Chris’s plan had been available at the time I think they would have been dropped earlier.
Sir Reg said that if built a motorway would pass within 20 ft of third floor flats in Gaitskell Court, Battersea. I guess we might now check the accuracy of that.
Absolutely brilliant to hear about you being there to report on the plan's death David - I can imagine London Centric would have been wall-to-wall Ringways if it had been around there.
And I think Sir Reg's claim looks like it checks out based on Chris' map?
After Labour took control of the GLC in 1973, and scrapped the Ringways, they reckoned 10,000 homes would be saved. They estimated 100,000 people were affected directed or through proximity to planned motorways.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/evening-standard-motorway-blight-lifted/184739595/
This is a superb piece of lived experience, David. Fascinating.
If anyone remembers the BBC show The Secret History of our Streets from c. 15 years ago, they had a great episode about slum clearance and preparing the city for the 20th century, focussing on Deptford IIRC. As this piece notes, houses they were trying to condemn now incredibly valuable.
Thanks Youtube! https://youtu.be/bSwts-kCTss?si=6AGrvcxswihdZ34R
The properties in the way of the motorways were bought up and left empty for ages until local housing campaigners set up a scheme to let them out to homeless families while the authorities wrangled. My dad worked on getting the properties habitable again.
The East Cross Route adjacent to Victoria Park and south to the Blackwall Tunnell WAS built and destroyed much of Poplar. The borough was bisected and it deeply affected community life. My understanding is that Tower Hamlets was one of few boroughs that was willing to implement the proposals - I guess it made more sense in the context of the second Blackwall Tunnel being opened.
I have read about public protests on Cadogan Terrace who wanted a bypass as the Blackwall Tunnel traffic was killing pedestrians/children crossing the road. It would be great to read more detail about this (eg the local feeling for and against) both here and for the few other instances of Ringway sections being built.
One reason the East Cross Route was built was that, like the Westway, it predated the Ringways system and was already well advanced in planning by the time the GLC was created. Generally speaking the only urban motorways the GLC built were planned before the Ringways in an era when there was less opposition at a public and political level.
Early drafts of the urban motorway plan for London had *another* East Cross Route motorway parallel to it, crossing the Thames near Rotherhithe, which was removed from the plan as an economy on the basis that the Blackwall Tunnel Northern and Southern Approaches were already in the planning process.
Thanks Chris for your excellent work. You may know the story of how childen’s play in the rubble of Westway construction in the 1960's eventually led to some beneficial development of the land beneath the motorway.
The original plans, in the spirit of the times, were for car parking, and it took four years of campaigning by the local community to achieve a change of heart. https://connections.commons.london/category/northken/
When I was taking my 4 year Business Studies Course in the early 70s at the Polytechnic of Central London, now the University of Westminster, I did my thesis on whether the 3 Ring Routes should happen. Sadly the finished document is no more but I remember my conclusion that they would never happen!
Super article - but I don’t think it’s been forgotten. Certainly by those who value the environment. And those of us who were involved in the campaign to protect Oxleas Wood from the motorway brigade took this as inspiration.
It truly is a horror story, but, having said that the entire transport system is like a Daisy - everything leading you to the centre.
What we really, really need is an equivalent Elizabeth Line linking SE London to SW London. And extending the Lizzie line to Dartford and Bromley to kick start the economies of those towns along the way. Invest in trains and not in roads.
That already exists - Overground. Just needs some service frequency increases and a station interchange put in in Brixton - TFL bought the building under the railway line only last week.
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/tfl-snaps-up-block-of-land-next-to-brixton-tube-station-85069/
The nearest overground is at New Cross. It takes hours to get there from Bexley, Bromley, Woolwich or Charlton or Greenwich.
SE London is extensive.
A linked project defeated by successful protests was demolishing Covent Garden and extending the Barbican deck system all the way to Piccadilly so cars would go below and people walk above. Again, many areas saved. I remember a meeting with London planners all those years ago when we suggested the Covent Garden central market could become a tourist market, and planners said "nonsense", it had to be demolished. Joseph Hanlon
My grandparents and great grandparents and aunts and uncles lived in Swinbrook Road W10 for decades, compulsorily purchased for the construction of the Westway. While by all accounts it was very run down, the scattering of the family to all boroughs and towns as a consequence, fractured a close knit group.
Fascinating and horrifying! Your years of dedication to researching this is truly impressive and appreciated. During my early childhood a major ringways plan was drawn up for Eastcote , middx - a quiet metroland suburb. The D ring, as it was called, would have swept away swathes of 1930’s housing including ours. I believe my dad was very active in organising protest against this and spoke at many public meetings. It was to be a link to the M1 but thankfully was scrapped.
Moving to Glasgow mid 70’s my dad again found himself protesting against another motorway plan which would have seen our home demolished. Using his experience from Eastcote he was able to help squash this ill thought out plan.
Thanks for all your hard work!