CBRD Blog

Croydon Ring Road

The what?

Croydon does have a ring road - sort of - and it’s the subject of a CBRD feature that’s currently in production. This post should give you a bit of a preview of what will be in it, and also ask your advice on how it might look.

Before we start, the ring road doesn’t exist any more, and that’s why you might not have heard about it. Croydon Council made several attempts to build it from the 1950s to the early 1980s, but gave up after completing three sides, and now signposts its component parts as separate roads. But it’s particularly interesting because, for the massive investment and the huge changes that were made to Croydon town centre in its name, and for all the colossal works of heavy engineering along the route, it would have been a terrible road. It has the occasional flash of brilliance, and it’s better than most of South London, but all the same it tends to hover somewhere between badly conceived and downright silly. My strap-line for the feature sums it up quite neatly: “common sense dictates that you shouldn’t be able to spend so much money on heavy engineering and end up with such a terrible road system”.

So far I’ve put together three photo galleries, one for each side of the ring that was built; a page of history is in planning to describe where the plan came from; and there’s also the usual CBRD hand-drawn map (this time with little traffic lights drawn on).

But is there anything else that I could (or should) be adding in there? Often I feel like the “In Depth” features covering specific roads (Queensway Tunnel, Coventry Ring Road, etc) are a bit too formulaic: there’s a page of history, maybe a video, and lots of pictures. Is there something else that would bring the Croydon Ring Road to life? Text on something else? Better photo captions? Something about lane markings? A children’s story about Bobby the Spotty Dog driving the Poochmobile around Croydon? Nothing immediately springs to mind, but perhaps I’m just overlooking the obvious.

You see, sometimes I will put something online and then get a well-meaning email straight afterwards that says “that new feature is great, but why didn’t you do this?”, and I usually bang my head on the keyboard. By that point I will have been slaving over the proverbial hot stove for several weeks, the photos and base material will have been gathered months before, and I will have no appetite whatsoever to return to it and add something new.

So this post is really an attempt to save my computer peripherals from taking any more sudden impacts from my forehead. All Croydon-based ideas are welcome!