The new road link would, the experts say, create a “corridor of opportunity”. It would “relieve congestion”, “improve accessibility” and “be of inestimable benefit to the capital”. It will, one supporter argues, “take longer-distance traffic off the existing main roads… enable cars and lorries to get from one side of London to the other without having to go through the centre; and… enable traffic to get to where it wants in London without having to drive endlessly through residential and congested streets.”
Anyone worried about the new road’s noise and environmental impact can relax: there will be “generous compensation [for] those living close enough to it to suffer additional noise or loss of amenity.” Far from “affecting the environment adversely, it will in fact improve it.” It’s time to stop dithering, says a supporter of the new link: “There can be arguments… over the wisest routes; there can be postponements and prevarication. But in the end the nettle must be grasped, if London is to breathe and thrive.”
Any Londoner taking an interest in TFL’s current proposals for a new road tunnel under the Thames at Silvertown, just downriver from the Blackwall Tunnel, and new road bridges over the Thames at Gallions Reach and/or Belvedere, might assume that these are excerpts from the ongoing consultation (respond quickly if you haven’t already done so: it closes on December 19). But you’d be wrong: all these quotations are taken from politicians advocating a “Motorway Box” around inner London, which would have entailed the demolition of much of Camden Town, Blackheath and Brixton, in the early 1970s.
The Blackwall Tunnel Southern Approach – shown in black on this brochure from the late 1960s – was supposed to form part of Ringway One, a “Motorway Box” around inner London that would also have driven a six-lane highway through Blackheath Village
There’s an eerie similarity between the rhetoric deployed in favour of an abandoned motorway scheme 45 years ago and the rhetoric deployed by TFL in favour of new river crossings in east London in 2014. Just like the GLC then, TFL now promises that new roads “will greatly reduce delays”, “considerably reduce the time users spend stuck in traffic” and “make the wider area more attractive to businesses and developers, supporting growth in one of the most deprived areas of the country”. The belief that new motorways in inner London can deliver any of these benefits was, supposedly, debunked in 1973 when Labour won control of the GLC on a “Home before Roads” ticket and immediately cancelled the Motorway Box (or “Ringways” as they had been innocuously renamed) after only three small sections had been built (in Shepherd’s Bush, North Kensington and south of the Blackwall Tunnel). Continue reading
Alex Grant 