CBRD Blog

A little Ringway preview

With a bit of luck, and Pathetic Motorways permitting, the much-anticipated new Ringways pages should be launched this coming Saturday. I say should because it really does depend on what that pesky Steven bloke over at PM is up to. We run a polite, gentlemanly system where we do a lot of joint research work and then share out the winnings. I recall one fruitful and exciting afternoon at The National Archives which ended with me laying claim to the Underways and Steven firmly planting his flag in the history of motorway numbering.

On this occasion, CBRD leads the charge where the Ringways are concerned (though PM covers the on-the-ground remnants in detail), but PM has an exclusive on a related unbuilt road scheme which wasn’t part of the Ringways plan but is mentioned in the pages. That’s why I now have to sit on my hands and wait patiently until PM’s exclusive has passed and I can go ahead.

Anyway, on to the stuff you’re actually interested in. What should you expect from the new Ringways pages?

Here’s a little taste of the graphics. Unlike the existing pages, the new ones are properly illustrated with photos, newspaper clippings, scale diagrams, artists’ impressions, maps and so on. The knotted mess above is part of a plan of just one proposal for a major interchange, and one that has had its fair share of speculation as to its possible upgrade, though I’m not saying which.

More than this, you can expect:

• a basic, no-nonsense introduction to the Ringways with an interactive map, so you can point at each road to see what it is and what it does. Newcomers need no longer fear the epic scale of the plans.
• more than 40,000 words of description for the hardcore road fans. The history of the scheme as a whole is traced in detail from the seventeenth century to the present day. Each road proposal is then explored in depth, with as much information as we know about its routing, history and alternatives.
• a basic strip-map of every road so you can get to know it better, and a thumbnail map of London to show where it would have been.
• facts, facts, facts. Everything you read will be based on solid evidence, dug out of an archive facility somewhere in London. Rare bits of speculation, where we don’t have the full picture yet, are clearly marked and considered dangerous intruders whose villainous words are to be treated with mistrust and contempt.
• the map - at long last - with the junction layouts as we know them so far. For every road where we have sufficient detail, you’ll see every carriageway and every sliproad plotted as accurately as possible on Google Earth satellite mapping. Each junction is also carefully annotated within the map, with links back to the text.

Of course, once it’s online, we go back to the archives to find out more. That’s the really exciting bit: that all of this is still a work in progress and there’s a lot we still don’t know.