The motorway age (1955–79) - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 87

incorporated unpleasant and sometimes downright threatening subways, burrows or
bridges to circumvent traffic flows which themselves were of much greater volume and
speed. The process of change - prolonged blight and physical upheaval - also came to
be seen as destructive of local communities and a contributor to the economic and
social decline of inner cities.
Large-scale highway projects which had been embarked on enthusiastically only a
few years earlier began to run into serious opposition. Unlike more recent campaigns
the basis of opposition did not centre so much on issues of long-term sustainability but
more on the direct effects of individual schemes - land take, housing demolition, noise
and air pollution, community severance and visual intrusion. Public disenchantment
with comprehensive redevelopment effectively put paid to the overall restructuring of
highways and access routes anticipated in the Buchanan report (Hills 1974).
Highway proposals nevertheless continued to be brought forward as individual
schemes. Often these derived from lines drawn on maps many decades previously
and had been incorporated in the networks tested in land use/transport studies.
The most notorious example was the building of the elevated Westway motorway
on the edge of Central London, linking White City and Euston Road. This formed
part of an arterial road plan for London prepared in 1911, included in the London
Transportation Study of the 1960s and opened in 1970. The design of the scheme
was such that at one point residents in houses adjacent to the new road could almost
reach out of their back bedroom windows and shake hands with people standing on
the hard shoulder!
Whatever the arguments surrounding urban motorways in principle it was plainly
unacceptable that people could have such environmental conditions imposed on
them and without any compensation. Following investigation of the subject (DOE
1972a) the 1973 Land Compensation Act gave highway authorities the powers to
purchase not merely the land and property required physically to construct the road,
but to incorporate appropriate environmental mitigation measures as well. They were
required to install insulation measures in all residential properties where as a result of
new road construction or road widening, noise levels exceeded 68 dB(a). They were
given discretion to pay for insulation against noise from road construction work and
from traffic on existing altered roads. The Act greatly civilised urban road building
procedures but its effect was more limited than anticipated since, by the mid-1970s,
public opinion was already swinging against such schemes in principle.
In London the GLDP incorporated long-standing proposals for a series of new orbital
routes - now of motorway standard and termed 'ringways'. Particularly contentious was
the innermost Ringway 1 - the so-called 'motorway box' - whose planned alignment
cut swathes through dense residential areas and which was estimated to require the
demolition of homes belonging to 100,000 people.
The campaigns of local objectors against the ringway proposals were co-ordinated
across the capital by an umbrella group, the London Amenity and Transport Association
(Thomson 1969). But whilst the technical arguments were proceeding at the GLDP
inquiry, raw politics took over in the shape of a decision by the London Labour Party to
abandon support for the ringway proposals and to campaign in the 1973 GLC elections
on a platform of 'Homes before Roads'. The Party won control and the ringway plans
were abandoned before the report of the GLDP inquiry was published (Hall 1980).
Similar battles were being fought in cities elsewhere in the country. The return
of local Labour administrations in 1973 was the scene of particularly dramatic policy
shifts in Nottingham and Oxford. In both cases controversial road schemes were