If you've ever tried driving around London you'll know what
a [BEEP]ing nightmare it is.
We Londoners spend longer sitting in traffic jams than anywhere else in the country
and most of us don't even enjoy it.
In the 1960s there were ambitious plans to completely transform London's roads
making jams like these a thing of the past.
They made a start in some places, but
as you can see
they didn't finish.
London was not designed for the car.
In fact it wasn't designed at all.
It grew in gradual steps with the Romans, Tudors and Victorians all contributing
their own streets, many of which remain today.
It's these very same streets that we in the 21st century squeeze onto
trying to get about in our cars, buses and lorries.
Look at this.
The quickest way to get from, say Hampstead to Highbury, is to go all the way
down to Camden Town through the complicated one-way system
all the way back up to Holloway and down Holloway Road, which takes ages.
At peak time, the average speed for that journey is a pathetic 10mph.
I can run that fast.
You might think "How can London go on with a road system is slow as this?"
Well, they were thinking about that as early as the 1940s.
In 1944, a man called Patrick Abercrombie produced the County of London Plan.
Its aim: to deal with the looming problem of congestion in London.
London was taking a beating in The Blitz, so there was a great opportunity for
rebuilding everything. Abercrombie saw it as a chance to give London a new road system
fit for the twentieth century.
In central London, narrow Victorian streets would be bulldozed to make way for wide, Paris-style
boulevards, and in the suburbs there'd be wide ring roads going in circles around the city.
Ring roads play a crucial role in modern town planning.
Here to explain is transport expert, Graham Roads.
Ring roads allow vehicles to travel from one side of town to the other
without going through the busy middle.
So that's fewer traffic jams
and faster journeys.
Patrick Abercrombie was really ahead of his time because the traffic
wasn't so bad in the forties.
People didn't pay much attention to his rather ambitious plans
until 20 years later.
By 1966, car ownership had skyrocketed.
Everyone had a car and everyone was causing traffic jams.
Abercrombie was dead by now
but his bold plans were just coming to life. Not only did the rebuilding of London's roads
seem like a good idea, it was now essential.
The planners of the 60s liked Abercrombie's ring roads idea
but they wanted to take it quite literally to a new level - a new type of road
that was futuristicer than anything Abercrombie had ever seen - the Motorway.
Six lanes, a central reservation and hard shoulder for safety,
no speed limits... back then.
The first motorway to open in Britain was the M1
invented in 1959. In 1966, for the first time, motorways were going
to be brought right to the heart of the capital.
Eurgh.
The plan was to build four motorway ring roads in and around London.
And the name for the project was 'Ringways'.
Ringway 1 was to form a motorway box around central London.
Ringway 2 was further out, making a circle through the middle of the suburbs.
Ringway 3 was further out still, roughly following the border of greater London.
And Ringway 4, way out in the countryside was for traffic that
wanted to avoid London altogether.
Today, hardly any of it has been built.
The plans were vast, ambitious, disruptive, expensive and extremely unpopular.
Only one complete circle was ever made:
The M25.
By 1973 they'd made a good start on Ringway 3
up near Potters Bar.
And at the time he was called the M16.
Bits of Ringway 4 were also starting to appear.
But two years later, the Ringways scheme was officially cancelled.
So instead, it was decided to connect up the bits of 3 and 4 that they'd built so far
making one complete loop.
Finally in 1986, the M25 was opened to the public
by Margaret Thatcher.
You can see evidence of them hastily stitching up the two routes today.
Up by South Mimms the M25 famously splits in twain, leaving a big
grassy gap in the middle.
That's because it was designed as a couple of slip-roads, and the rest of
Ringway 3 was meant to go this way.
Today, the M25 has earned itself an infamous reputation in popular culture.
"The M25..."
It is the most congested motorway in the UK.
and is increasingly inadequate for the needs of London and the South East.
For example
People traveling from Brighton to Reading
use this section of the M25
and people traveling from Croydon
trying to get their flight at Heathrow use the SAME section of the M25.
Busy busy busy!
All on its own, the M25 does a job that was meant to be taken on by three motorways.
There's no alternative further out and there's no real alternative further in.
The closest thing London has to a suburban ring road is made up of the
North Circular and the South Circular.
But they're not much good either.
The North Circular whizzes through the suburbs like a twat going...
"Yeeeeeah! Look at me!
Out of my way! I'm the. . . ahem. . .
I'm the North Circular! Wahaaay!!
But it comes to an abrupt stop at the Woolwich Ferry.
And then, once south of the river, it has a complete change of character, going
Sorry, excuse me, do you mind if I, terribly sorry, excuse me, could I just, sorry..
So how did we end up with only half of Ringway 2? 0:05:50.666,0:05:54.999 In other words, why is north London better than south London?
The reason predates Ringways by several decades.
The North Circular Road came about in the 30s when much of north London
was still being developed. So there was loads of room to make it wide, fast
and more or less future-proof. When the Ringways scheme came along in 1966
all it needed was a bit of widening here and there. Half the job done!
The South Circular on the other hand was a different story altogether.
The route it takes goes on streets that have been here for centuries.
In fact there isn't really such thing as the South Circular Road at all.
It's just a series of scarcely believable road signs.
It was then, and still is now,
totally inadequate as a ring road.
But widening it was out of the question.
To finish Ringway 2, they needed to build a completely new South Circular
that was as much of a twat as the North.
But to build a 20th century road through 19th century suburbs, it was a case
of ploughing through whatever buildings were unlucky enough to be in the way.
This nice street was on their hit list.
The best way to see the destruction the new road would have caused
is to look from above... wheeeeeee.
A total of 36,000 people in suburbs
like Beckenham and Crystal Palace would have their homes exploded
to make way for the new road.
One look at this terrifying artist's impression,
and the planners decided
It just wasn't worth it.
So Ringway 2 was cancelled and outer London was spared.
But in central London, traffic was at such a stand-still that something had to be done.
So in 1967, a small section of motorway was given the go-ahead.
London's Westway twists and turns from White City to Marylebone.
Although technically not part of Ringways, it give us a perfect view of
what Ringway 1, the motorway box would have looked like and how it would have
affected the surrounding area.
Eurgh.
Argh!
AARGH!!
AAAAAARGH!!!!!
(sobs)
It was the construction of the Westway that woke London up to the reality
of what a city throttled by a motorway box would be like.
Just like here in Notting Hill, many more parts of inner London would have
a motorway like this blasted through the middle including Kilburn...
Camden...
Canonbury...
Brixton...
and Battersea.
The locals were understandably not happy
and they protested.
Londoners took to the streets to oppose what they saw as the destruction of
their city. And if that wasn't enough of a headache for the Greater London Council,
The Treasury weren't happy about how much the Ringways scheme was going to cost.
There were some heated discussions at the time between the GLC and the Treasury
as to who would finance the London Ringways Scheme
Uh huh...
Ringway 1 was causing the most controversy as it was it was the most expensive per mile.
Really?
We estimated it would cost £2 billion. That's £18 billion in today's money.
That's very interesting(!)
But there was no public support and negative press
so the government decided it could not finance the London Ringways Scheme.
A combination of protest, financial woes and political kerfuffle brought an end to
Ringways 4, 3, 2 and 1.
So what legacy remains of Ringways today?
Looking on a map, there are flecks of Ringway 4 which in some parts of Hertfordshire
is confusingly called the "North Orbital Road"
The short and stubby West Cross Route in Shepherds Bush was planned as part of
Ringway 1, and so was the East Cross Route.
Until the year 2000, these were both shown in blue as proper motorways on the map.
Also, when Ringways was cancelled, it had a knock-on effect
and lots of other road building projects were cancelled too
including some that they'd already started.
The M23 from Brighton stops at this mysterious unfinished junction
just after the M25
instead of Ringway 2 where they wanted it to finish.
Here's another example
The M1 which stops at Staples Corner.
You can see on Google Earth that they left plenty of room at this junction
for it to carry on further south. But without Ringway 1
there was nowhere for it to end.
If built to plan, the M1 would have met Ringway 1 at West Hampstead
at an enormous triple layer junction totally ruining this landsc... eurgh, really?
Surely no one cares about this place.
It's tempting when you're in a traffic jam like this one to think about how
useful those Ringways would have been
but it's a complicated issue. There are pros and cons.
Pro: The motorways would have taken traffic away from the surface streets.
This road would be much nicer, quieter and safer if it weren't lumbered with the
unenviable task of being the South Circular.
Con: 60% of Londoners would have lived two miles away from a motorway.
They would have been so ugly, so prominent, and so everywhere,
that London would have become famous for them.
Pro: With Ringways, East London would have got itself a new bridge at Woolwich.
Much more convenient than this boat.
Con: The motorways would be physical boundaries dividing up communities.
Londoners would probably identify themselves by which ringroads
they were stuck between.
Pro: They'd make journeys faster.
Con: Actually they wouldn't
Studies have shown time after time that buildings new roads attracts more cars.
Los Angeles is mostly highways, and the traffic jams there are worse than here!
Had Ringways happened in London, it would have set the precedent that you're supposed to drive.
The jams would continue, and Ringways would defeat their own purpose.
You have to admire the optimism and confidence they had back then.
In the 60s the word "progress" was a much simpler word.
More cars! Taller buildings! Wider roads! Rebuild everything! More! Everything we do is amazing!
But today's approach is a softer, more cautious one.
It's not that we're scared of progress
we're simply scared of cars.
Transport policy today is almost entirely about measures to reduce the
number of drivers.
The fact that London is such a crazy improbable maze is possibly the best way
to encourage people not to bother with the car and use public transport instead.
The lack of motorways has allowed areas like Camden to come to life.
I think future generations trying to solve the transport problems of their time will be grateful
for what the twentieth century didn't do.
So it looks like for the foreseeable future, we'll have to sit in traffic jams
no matter what.
And if that's true we might as well sit in our traffic jams and enjoy the view.