As anyone looking to properly understand London’s transport needs and network knows, context, background and best-practice are important. As readers might imagine, behind the scenes here at LR Towers we thus spend a lot of time sharing links and reading around the subjects we cover here. We also occasionally share links containing good information about transport topics that we know we just don’t have time to cover. We also all, as authors, occasionally write elsewhere on this or tangentially related subjects.
Many of these links we share on the London Reconnections Twitter account, but we recently realised it would perhaps be useful if we shared these to readers here as well, for the benefit of those who do not follow us there.
So this will hopefully be the first of a regular series of posts featuring a curated list of what we have been reading throughout the week. These may be directly related to transport in London in particular, or simply to the wider topics that influence our understanding of London, how transport works (locally, globally or historically) and how people travel.
Similarly, a reminder that if readers encounter things they feel we might be interested in reading we would love to receive them. Simply send a link (and any context you feel useful) to [email protected].
LR Authors elsewhere
- An Empire of Stars: The History of the British Space Programme – Lapsed Historian (recently revised) [Author: John Bull]
- London’s forgotten Pneumatic Tubes – Lapsed Historian (for those who missed it the first time) [Author: Long Branch Mike]
Good reads
- London’s weekly railway news #175 – Ianvisits
- The British Rail Corporate Identity Manual has been republished – British Rail Manual / Wallace Henning [Editor’s note: I have a copy, it is a magnificent reprint. JB]
- We Finally Know How London’s Famous Killer Fog Formed – Gizmodo
- Feels Like a Good Afternoon for Virtually Crawling Through the Sewers of Victorian London – Jezebel
- Bridge competition debris part 14: Thames Water Habitable Bridge – The Happy Pontist
- The Zany Car Park Skyscraper That London Almost Had – Londonist
- Register before Monday for priority on Hidden London tickets – London Transport Museum
- 1961 plans for Piccadilly Circus – Dirty Modern Scoundrel
- Boats of the Pearl River 1800 – 1820 – Socks Studio
I’m excited that this is going to become a regular feature.
Might not always be this long, but yes – seemed silly not to share some of the things we’d been reading.
Best not have Greg see that link to the 1961 proposals for Piccadilly Circus! It’ll set him off on one…. 😉
SHLR
Doesn’t surprise me in the least.
That was the era of demolish Euston Arch/Propylaeum & demolish Tower Bridge & Demolish St Pancras, & worst of all ( out of London) Demolish Edinburgh’r Royal Mile & Old Town (!)
It’ll never cease to amaze me how ‘redevelopment’ in the immediate postwar period meant ‘demolish and start again, preferably using concrete’ to some (even where the Luftwaffe hadn’t already carried out some of the preliminary work). Those Picadilly Circus designs are scarily dystopian in what they envisaged for the area! Thank god for small mercies, and that the Circus was left untouched for my young eyes to see it much as it is portrayed in that film clip (obviously with updated signs, vehicles etc).
@GT….Who on earth suggested demolishing Tower Bridge and the oldest part of Edinburgh??? I was vaguely aware of some plan to redevelop Edinburgh in the past, but I thought that was the Georgian New Town.
Seeking more information on demolishing Edinburgh Old Town. Though it is a fact that the late 18th century garden suburb (generally known as the New Town) was a conservation area long before the Old Town was. My least favourite building in the Old Town was the horror on a former brewery site on the south side of Grassmarket. It’s been replaced by something much more respectful of its neighbours.
Anonymously
Try:
http://www.scotsman.com/heritage/people-places/lost-edinburgh-the-city-centre-motorway-plan-1-3558851
There were others, equally horrible.
I can’t presently find a link, but some (tory?) MP in the very early 60’s campaigned to get Tower Bridge demolished ( & St Pancras, of course )
I understand Glasgow had a narrower escape. I recall a BBC documentary which covered the post war proposal espoused by the City’ engineer (or architect I forget which) to raze everything to the ground in the centre replacing the current street layout with a grid of wide roads. Each resulting city block would be composed of uniform architecture based on the principles developed by Le Cobusier. A “magnificent vista” of uniform concrete buildings was envisaged which would replace the despised architecture of the past and I think the streets would no longer have names but a rational use of numbers and letters would have been used.
This totalitarian vision almost happened as the City Council was inclined to proceed. What stopped it was the push for new towns in particular the East Kilbide proposal. Ultimately this was seen as even more attractive and Glasgow lost its chance as funding was given to East Kilbride in preference to the Glasgow scheme.
Something strange occurred in post war Britain in respect of architecture and our cities and towns still display the unfortunate results of this quest for “rational modern and scientific” outcomes. I still recall the Tricorn centre in Portsmouth it was heralded as one of the best modern buildings by architects at the time and then derided by the same body as one of the worst buildings in Britain decades later.
Many of the Glasgow plans were implemented: in particular, the M8 was ploughed through Townhead/Cowcaddens, an area previously of high density with tenements, local shops, trams.
Agreed. It is striking how many other bomb-wrecked cities in Continental Europe (even ones that were completely flattened, such as Warsaw), were rebuilt to somewhat resemble how they were pre-war, albeit with exceptions (e.g. Rotterdam). Whereas in this country, our attitude was to use the damage (even where it was minimal or non-existent, such as in Edinburgh) as an blank canvas/excuse to update our cityscapes with little regard for their heritage, geography, or whatever made them attractive in the first place (which I admit is fairly subjective). Was it purely down to cultural differences?
Before anyone accuses me of architectural Luddism, I have no objections to modern cityscapes in places where there was no development previously (Brasilia and Chandigarh were built from scratch, and are now admired), or even to urban redevelopment where it is sorely needed (such as the Docklands). I just feel that time and hindsight has shown just how badly served we were by some of these planning decisions, all in the name of progress (which, above all else, seemed to prioritise bowing down before the might of the motor vehicle).
Rant over…..
An excellent idea – http://transportblog.co.nz often has a good weekly reading list to ‘pillage’ for other links!
Not mad keen on the city centre big roads of Hull or Plymouth. Coventry, on the other hand, is much more to a human scale and they kept the few old bits that were salvageable.
Anonymously et al
Unless you were there I suspect that no-one could really understand the drive to get away from the past which really pushed the late 40s and early 50s. It explains, amongst other things how little opposition there was to demolishing the Euston Arch and how easy it was to get rid of many other old structures that we would now see public outrage at the mere suggestion of demolition. The urge was more than just physical and included the urge to get away from the social past and was exemplified by the unexpected landslide win for Labour in the 1945 general election.
@Greg Tingey – There are a number of mentions in Hansard re. Tower Bridge, e.g.: HC Dec 31 July 1963
§ 49. Mr. Mellish asked the Minister of Transport if he will make a statement about the proposed tunnel under the Thames to replace Tower Bridge.
§ Mr. Galbraith I understand that the City’s plan for such a tunnel is still in a very preliminary stage. We have already said that, so far as we are concerned, the sooner this plan comes to fruition the better.
P.S. Ignore the “Dec” above. See also: National Heritage Bill – HL 21 November 1996
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of National Heritage (Lord Inglewood)…Let me now turn to Tower Bridge. Nobody in this Chamber or elsewhere could claim that Tower Bridge has any aesthetic qualities whatever. It is a monstrosity. Every man of sensitivity realises that that is so. The only people who do not think it is a monstrosity are those who do not look at it. It is also architecturally unsound, for this reason &c. &c. ….
Graham Feakins: The quote you give about Tower Bridge being a monstrosity is quite interesting, but a quick glance at the surrounding context shows that it had nothing whatever to do with any plans to demolish or replace it. It was made in connection with an attempt to amend the National Heritage Bill to include the word “engineering”.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that when this happened in 1964 http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2137/5699863981_1b9cc758a8_z.jpg the local council did not see it as a golden opportunity to widen the road, but were enlightened enough to rebuild it stone by stone, and it stands to this day as the only Roman arch in the country that one can still drive under.
As we’re talking about concrete swathes and mass demolition then Newcastle upon Tyne is a pretty strong candidate. The central motorway was smashed through very nice parts of Jesmond and the edge of Shieldfield. The wider plan was to have motorways all over the city centre with whatever shops remained all contained inside what is now INTU Eldon Square. The Eldon Square shopping centre wiped out a swathe of the north / western part of the City Centre and eventually added various bits to almost achieve the original plan. I used to have an old brochure that showed this “brave new world”. Thankfully the motorway madness stopped and some of the classic streets and building survive and prosper. However the “pull” of Eldon Square is such that areas like Grainger St, Clayton St and around the south end of the City Centre near the old Worswick St bus station are run down and denuded of attractive retail outlets. The scrapping of two major bus stations has also significantly altered footfall and pedestrian patterns in the City Centre. Oddly the City Council has never managed to put anything forward to “balance out” how the city centre functions.
The really depressing thing is that the central motorway is a traffic jam in the peaks and car traffic and congestion is rising inexorably in Tyne and Wear. I see the traffic cams and congestion / bus delay reports via Twitter and it’s as if all the efforts of the 1980s to try to reverse growing car usage have been rendered useless by poor planning policies and bus deregulation. Newcastle City Council has always had a very lukewarm approach to traffic restraint – probably because of what it earns from car parks! Now it seems intent on building more and more mega junctions to cope with cars while happily losing local amenity land and worsening air quality. Unreal – when viewed with “London rose tinted specs” (just to add a tiny bit of balance 😉 )
The full scale of the original Newcastle plan is discussed here
http://pathetic.org.uk/features/tyneside/
and here, with maps
http://www.cbrd.co.uk/motorway/assets/a167m/motorway_planning_in_newcastle_upon_tyne.pdf
@timbeau – the list of near misses includes encasing York in a dual carriageway round the walls – a proposal that effectively triggered a seachange in attitudes to urban relief roads – and the various grade separated interchanges planned for the Euston Road – something that required much of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia to be demolished. Even so, the damage done has been enormous; not just to Newcastle, but also cities and towns cut off from their hinterland, eg Leeds and many smaller market towns too numerous to list in full,; Aylesbury and Horsham will stand as good representatives of quiet country towns with horrid carbuncles overwhelming a centre now encased in beton brut fortifications and accessible to pedestrians only with extreme difficulty.
The interesting question is how we got into such a state. I would blame in part architectural dogma – das autogerecht Stadt, la cite machine etc -but also the state of many British towns by the end of the war. Look at any pictures of ’40s and ’50s Britain, and you will see shabby and filthy buildings everywhere (the illustrations to the thread on the Euston propylaeum are a good example). I wouldn’t seek to defend Corbusier and Modern Civic architecture but the idea of clean glasswalled buildings set in parkland* must have seemed very attractive to many at the time.
*Architects have the cheek,of course, to bewail the fact that the actual built products of this work, far from being set in birch forests with picture windows through which you watch the wolves course to the music of Sibelius, were actually squeezed cheek by jowl onto sites on the rings roads and overlooking the industrial estates
@Graham H: Agree entirely in general but must disagree about pedestrian accessibility in the case of Horsham. I found the one really bad place to be a pedestrian was just outside the station, which dates from at least the Fifties and a situation unchanged in the recent reworking of the frontage. I’ve recently moved away but was a medium-term resident. In the centre, given that development was going to occur, the result wasn’t too bad at all in my view. I don’t know the detail offhand but it was I think after the Sixties. Linking in to the recent and future estates on the wrong side of the bypass is probably a rather different matter. Still, I suspect this is getting a bit far from the topic.
I remember the time when the lure of the new was overwhelming. I confess to being totally won over by it at the time. Graham H is right, things looked horribly shabby. There were still random gaps due to bomb damage, and all Victorian buildings had suffered at least half a century of smoke pollution. The car was seen as a liberating force as it was becoming affordable by large numbers of ordinary people, like my factory worker dad. The concrete buildings were well lit, unlike their predecessors.
Very few of us realised that the car would destroy mobility before a few decades were out, and that the new buildings would be neglected and become outdated in their own way. One problem we have here is that no one ever seems to think of cleaning old concrete buildings, or painting them. The Germans think nothing of slapping a reviving coat of paint on a 50 year old building. Go to Cologne. You will see almost no dirty concrete buildings among all that Wirtschaftswunder rebuilding that the RAF made essential. We now mostly cherish old buildings, but only the Prince of Wales thinks of filling the gaps with real individual style that compliments the surroundings.
@Graham H….And yet clean-walled modern architecture in a parkland setting *does* exist…..the capital city of Australia (Canberra) is one such place, for example. Having lived there for a brief time, it was definitely very pleasant experience environment (although its public transport infrastructure was a joke for a city of its size, forcing me to rely on a car), but is still derided by Australians for all the reasons that you mention. Perhaps people will appreciate it more a hundred years from now, but don’t hold your breath ?.
@Fandroid….It’s also partly due to the choice of building material. Unless carefully looked after in the manner that you mention, concrete ages horribly quickly (especially in wet climates such as ours) in comparison to other building materials. For a good example of this, just wander around Coventry and compare the brickwork and concrete buildings that were built after the war and see for yourself which ones have withstood the passage of time better.
@Anonymously – I don’t doubt that done “properly”, modern Bauhaus and Corbusier architecture can even be exciting. One notes that most of the architects’ paintings and drawings for their buildings do indeed show the glass-walled buildings set in pleasant parkland and in pristine condition. I even remember as a somewhat pretentious 12 year old being captivated by the Basil Spence drawings for Coventry Cathedral. But, of course, the rats got at them, and the master planning standards were abandoned on cost grounds pdq as was any attempt at maintenance. Few, if any, buildings of that era are now in the sort of context that style was meant for (ie drawing in the parkland to the interior of the building , borrowing external space for domestic use, and so on).
In respect of your answer to Fandroid, it may be worth considering how well vernacular materials stand the stresses of time… Industrially manufactured materials (even industrial brick ) rarely seem to produce cherished architecture – although see my comments above on the use of glass and concrete done carefully…!
[None of this excuses Brutalism, however, which many critics fail to distinguish from Bauhaus and Art Deco/Moderne, and which usually seems to be a deliberate attempt to kill both the neighbourhood and its inhabitants]
@ Graham H : good points; but “the beauty of transport” blog – see this week’s reading list – & I have a soft spot for Southern ‘Moderne’; not least because I’m a child of L S & W R territory.
I was all set to quote Canberra as where most damage was done by postwar English planning, when I noticed someone else had already mentioned the city. I live in Melbourne and pass through Canberra around once a year. Just let me say that what it is now (rather nice in places that are hard to get between) is nothing compared to what it could and should have been.
The original design for Canberra was by Americans, Walter and Marion Burley Griffin. In the late 1950s-1960s the Australian Government invited none other than William Holford to consult on the plan. This was the same guy responsible for the 1960s Paternoster Square project in the City of London, and the Piccadilly schemes mentioned above. His plans changed the transport from the mesh of trams that Burley Griffin envisioned to expressways. Where the Burley Griffins’ Canberra had direct access to the Lake now named after him and to the Botanic Gardens, Parkes Way now cuts it off from Civic.
These days the Federal Government no longer controls city planning, and the city has its own government which decides these things. The plan is to put in a tram system, and the recent election was fought on exactly that issue. Unfortunately, there are now many mature trees on Griffin’s 1920s tram reservations which will go.
I’ve a simpler take on it.
Some Architects forgot, if they’d ever heard, that “the expert should be on tap, not on top” and were allowed to run amok.
That might be easy to explain in the case of those who chose to be, and remain (card-carrying) members of the Communist Party, but they were hardly the only ones.
If you really want mad architects let loose on an unsuspecting public try this utter insanity !!
[Normally this would be moderated for language but in this case we will make an exception. PoP]