LONDON WAYS

by Naomi Chadwick, Community Architect

Developers have built most of London's housing stock for us with almost all the common land hard surfaced into roads and pavements linking them into the nationwide network of vehicular roads - and that is what we have got. For half a century, planners with an eye to social requirements have advocated a different arrangement for new housing, proposing that we would be better served with a network of pedestrian ways and domestic common spaces flowing beside front doors. A subordinated system for cars, service vehicles and public transport was to have been tucked away, more remotely.

Sweden's fifth largest city, Linkoping, has new satellite villages with green grass "roads", interconnecting courts of housing arranged alongside play areas for the very young and other community rooms, buildings and open spaces of domestic scale. No-one parks outside their front door. Parking spaces are provided beside the shopping sheds, the primary schools and at the call-in points for buses. There are garage courts linked to the periphery roads. The Swedish can, and do entertain choices both ethical and practical to either take their older children to school by car or to send them by bus, or in the summer on their bicycles. Swedish commuters have to make the same choices. Close to Linkoping's city centre, the old barracks have mostly been demolished to make way for housing of a higher population density, financed in a variety of ways. But again, parking has been kept strictly to the periphery. Even the rubbish collection vehicles have been kept out by a neat invention; the rubbish chutes around the sites have pneumatically sealed doors - like the door on a washing machine - and the rubbish is sucked to collection points on the periphery roads. What struck me was the presence of mind with which the Swedes had comprehensively solved their planning problems in an ethical and practical way.

London has a different set of problems and circumstances; a dense population, a polarised political structure and no central administrative authority to orchestrate efforts. But no-one should think that, were a replacement created today, we will have learnt anything from the mistakes of the last set of administrators who built new roads and widened existing roads as a sine qua non (something which is essential - Ed). In the fifties, when the radial shopping high streets into London had been thoroughly clogged with traffic, the transport planners set out new 'arterial' roads to the centre. They slashed routes across street after street. They replaced neighbourhoods with 'social housing'. They condemned hundreds of thousands who now live within the areas blighted by the dirt, din and poisons of heavy traffic, to a great desolation.

What follows is a set of legislation that would reduce all vehicular traffic on all London roads. It does not involve road building or road widening. It sets out to quieten and to bring back form and identity to the old villages and parishes, to their high streets and with more careful planning, to the more recent sprawl of London suburbia. It would achieve the town planners concept: to provide socialising places outside our front doors.

1. Prevent neighbourhood through traffic.
Reduce the speed limit on domestic roads to 15 mph. Designate a network of neighbourhood service roads with a 30 mph speed limit. Where required, block roads against through traffic.

2. Organise off street neighbourhood parking.
Enable the erection of local garaging and daytime car parks accessed off the service roads. Reduce parking time on domestic roads to 30 minutes. Ban kerbside parking on service roads.

3. Rethink bus routes.
Probably commuters would use the service road bus routes. Regular little buses and taxis could collect and deliver passengers at a sheltered neighbourhood centre.

4. Dedicate a suburban cycle and bus network on shopping high streets.
Private motor vehicles would be banned. The roads would be dedicated to cyclists, buses and taxis. Cyclists would be given lanes on the crown of the road. The network needs a spiders web form of radials (and where feasible, circular routes). London's oldest roads, now traffic laden shopping high streets, would form the radial routes. I call them 'London Ways'. All of these roads are 200 years old and some were laid almost 2000 years ago.

5. Restrict entries to Central London roads; pedestrianise Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square.
The following recommendations for traffic calming in Westminster and the City come from an article by George Stern, The Times, 3rd December 1994: "Extend the City of London 'lego curtain' to include Euston Road, the Thames Bridges, Park Lane and Victoria... block off, or narrow for cars, entrance points and Thames Bridges... cut the car lanes to one way each at 20 m.p.h... pedestrianise or provide a single slow lane of cars and buses around Whitehall. Trafalgar Square's unique vistas to the Houses of Parliament, Admiralty Arch and Buckingham Palace, together with St. Martin's in the Fields and the National Gallery..."

The 'lego curtain' of interlinking red and white weighted plastic lane reducers and road blocks was a quick, cheap solution; which is part of Sterns' excellent and persuasive recommendations. It would probably cost no more to furnish widened pavements and lane dividers in traditional materials with more lasting good looks. I have drawn a 'London Ways' map showing a larger central London area than George Stern has suggested for traffic calming. This would include historic Southwark and both London's major parks. Parking in Central London would be sufficient only for residents and service vehicles.

I will try not to eulogise. We are slaves to motor cars and slavery was not ended without sacrifice. But this sacrifice would bring a very big dividend. Those using private vehicles and everyday service vehicles would be able to move easily about outer London on the network of service roads and arterial roads. Drivers would be able to make visits to households on domestic roads using a local car park for visits of longer than 30 minutes. Drivers would be able to reach everywhere they now get in private transport except along the 'London Ways'. Emergency vehicles would use all the roads.

Neighbourhoods with a 15 mph speed limit are cycle friendly places. The twenty four hour curbside parking restriction would mean few cars to restrict visibility when children cross the road. Commuters would walk from home to service road bus stops or cycle to train stations or along the London Ways, or they would walk to the garage blocks. Those who stay in the vicinity of their homes would reap the benefits of more clearly defined communities and would respond. There would be neighbours on the streets, a place to gather and exchange joys and sorrows before the bus called in, less noise to spoil the bird song, less confusion and better scents to smell. Children would benefit from the lower age at which they could go about the neighbourhood unaccompanied. Hopefully, car trips to and from school would be a thing of the past.

The benefits of cycling to work across five or more miles in London without having to contend with heavy crisscrossing traffic, parked cars in the cycle lanes, juggernauts and drivers who cannot tolerate a cyclist in their path do not need to be stressed. However, the super car as status symbol and supermarket shopping habit might cause many to overlook the basic benefits: cycles are efficient, the journeys would be invigorating, informative and at times socially challenging; cycles can be used for a very wide age range. It is sure to create a demand for cycle storage and showers at work places.

The necessity of affording garage space would make car owners review the new alternatives before settling for holding on to this dearest of possessions. The remoter siting of cars from the home would reduce the number of trips taken in private cars. The average age of car owners would rise. Essential professional car and van users and the disabled driver would enjoy more space on domestic roads and daytime parking space. At present, much professional time is taken up finding parking spaces. The effect on shopping habits is a subject warranting separate consideration. Sufficient to say that we could hope to see small and local businesses flourishing.

I have set out a package of planning legislation that I believe would lift the chaos off our streets. It remains only to remind the reader that the general use of private cars is a serious threat to our health and the stability of life around us. It is high time we ceased to confuse private car ownership with civilisation.

Naomi Chadwick, Community Architect - 11 Milton Road, London W7 1LQ.

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