CBRD Blog

Those pesky Ringways again

I have a strange relationship with what have become known as the London Ringways. It’s not love-hate exactly - not nearly as polarised as that. No, it’s more love-worry.

I love them as much as ever. I love them because they are right at the very heart of my interest in roads: my favourite ‘elements’ of road enthusiasm, in no particular order, would have to be urban motorways, wild 1960s plans for roads that were never built, little stubs and empty spaces that are leftovers from road schemes that never happened, and some of that excitement and romance of the open road that seemed to die out in the early 1970s. The Ringways have all that in spades. Other things do of course: the Glasgow feature on CBRD covers the whole range listed above. But the Ringways do it on a much bigger scale. The biggest scale possible in this country, in fact.

The worry side of the relationship is there precisely because I love researching and working with the Ringways. Along with Steven Jukes and a few others, I’ve been researching London’s road plans for about four years now. It’s reaching the sort of epic proportions, as a research project, that we are in danger (or at least, I am) of becoming wrapped up in an introverted world of technical terms and historical minutiae to the extent that it becomes inaccessible to anyone else.

Already what we have researched so far - bearing in mind that it is still very much a work in progress full of unknowns and uncertainties - has produced a write-up for public consumption that now runs to more than 40,000 words, plus many illustrations and a map of the whole plan as we currently understand it. None of it’s online yet; I have more to write, would you believe. My concern is that it’s getting to the stage where there is too much for anyone who is not as deeply involved as Steven or I to be interested in reading. The trouble is that, from my point of view, I am rapidly losing the ability - in fact, I think I probably already have lost the ability - to judge what is worth telling and what is not. I think I’m too deeply involved in the minute details of the story to be able to edit my description of it. The result is that I don’t edit it at all, I just write everything down.

You can tell how deeply involved we are by the number of terms we use in conversation that are either jargon or complete invention. Take the motorway proposal that started life in the 1940s as “Parkway E”. When we first discovered it, we couldn’t find a name for it, so to us it was “MSM”, the Mystery Southern Motorway. Now we go with the name “South Cross Route to Parkway D Radial”, though the GLC very often referred to it as Parkway E and we could just as easily use that. I think partly it’s because it’s more interesting and obscure to call it SCRPDR that we choose to use that name for it.

I think Ringway 4 is the best example of all, though. It occurred to me a few days ago that I don’t recall ever having seen the name Ringway 4 in any official documentation. I have a very serious concern that we might have invented it ourselves, as shorthand to refer to the Ministry of Transport’s proposal for the North Orbital and South Orbital Roads, and then subsequently forgotten that it was only our nickname. But there it is now, all over 40,000 words of the website. I don’t believe that the GLC or the Ministry ever used the term “Ringways” like we do to refer to the whole project, either. Does it matter? Well, like I say, I don’t think I am the best person to make a judgement like that any more. My head is buried too deeply to see the bigger picture.

My final worry is that 40,000 words plus maps, diagrams, sketches, scans and pictures is just too big for a single feature in a single section of a website. It’s in danger of dwarfing the rest of CBRD. That’s definitely a worry.

I’d be interested to hear what you make of it all - is it too much information on one corner of Britain’s road network? Or are you keen to get hold of all the information possible? It would be good to know. It might even stop me worrying so much.