Building Down
James Forsyth 10:33am
There’s a fascinating piece in The Times today arguing that rather than building ever upwards in London we should bore down. Certainly, the idea of putting some of London’s hideously congested roads, the slowest in Europe, underground is appealing.
Kit Malthouse points out that if the Hyde Park interchange was to go below ground then “the three great parks of Central London could be united. You could walk from Parliament Square to Queensway, about three miles, without crossing a road. Park Lane would be freed up for redevelopment, and a grand new public square could be created at Marble Arch.”
My reservation is that we don’t do big projects particularly well in this country and it is all too easy to imagine this turning into some kind of British big dig and bringing London to a total standstill. But if it could be done right, it would certainly be worth doing.
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Comments
salieri
February 26th, 2008 10:58amNot while Ken's in charge, please. He's good at boring down of course but is happy to leave the hole indefinitely where it is, provided it fouls up the traffic so that he can pontificate about the need to tax it. As for our not doing big projects "particularly well" in this country - what a deliciously ironic understatement. Ken's men can't even put up a statue.
The Wonderful Jones
February 26th, 2008 11:54amI've not read the article but I take it it is influenced by what is happening over in Amsterdam at the moment where there are plans to work downwards.
Greg Skinner
February 26th, 2008 1:32pmAs an architect (alright, student thereof), I heartily agree! There just isn't enough pedestrianisation in London!
dexey
February 26th, 2008 4:59pmSo lond as pedestrianisation includes cyclists, I agree.
J H Holloway
February 26th, 2008 6:26pmAs he says in the piece, the inspiration is Madrid which is just about to bury its urban motorways. I fear that we could never, ever manage this in London.
Sadly, one of Ken Leninspart's first politcal moves was to help stop the 1960s/70s inner London ringway, a sort of Tokyo-style periferque which would have kept huge amounts of traffic out of central London - why else are the Paris streets so quiet?
As for being in lead in traffic management - forget it. Livingstone and TFL are the definitive failed technocrats - just like Nu Labour.
Despite the hype we have a C-Charge system that was outdated in 2003, outdated diesel-fired buses (everybody else uses gas-power), the world's most polluting taxi, the most polluted air in Europe and have embraced ugly, space-reducing urban safety management for the roadscape when the rest of Europe is into naked 'shared space' streets.
Road boffins should click on this great British website to see what might have been....
http://www.cbrd.co.uk/histories/ringways/ringway1.shtml#scr
J H Holloway
February 26th, 2008 6:38pmActually - this lnk
http://www.cbrd.co.uk/histories/ringways/map/2_05.shtml
gives you the exact map of the never-built London ringway
Jo
February 27th, 2008 11:26amI've thought for some time that the south circular needs to be buried in a tunnel - that way we can get decent sppeds across south London without turning half of it into a six lane motorway!! I mean, it's not as if there's any tube lines down there is it?