The confusion starts with the naming of it, and names are utterly important. The roads have been given specific numbers according to their grade so not to confuse motorists. The south stretch of the road going from Blackwall Tunnel down to Kidbrooke, across Est Greenwich and Eltham, has a long peculiar story. It has many names and denominations too. It is fascinating reading through its history and going back to the debates in the House of Commons before the Plan for its implementation, the infamous Ringroad 1, one of the four planned all around the capital in the early Seventies. Rather than summarise this story, I give you a couple of links, below. To cut a long story very short, the motorway went ahead for this part of London, while most of the Plan was scrapped, conflating in the infamous M25.
What I am interested in is first of all the unpacking of the rhetoric that at the time accompanied the building of the motorway (by the way, for a bureaucratic reason it has been downgraded to an A road, A12, but it has all the characteristic of an M road, including the SOS and the six lanes). An incredible leaflet, a ruin of the time, has been found and rescued from oblivion by the weblog cited thereafter, from which I have also taken a couple of images. As I haven’t had a chance to read it myself, I can only point out to the original source and to the comments made around it:
“It’s a Greater London Council document about the proposed new Blackwall Tunnel Southern Approach Road (the A102). Charmingly, one of the ingredients is ribbed concrete. The pamphlet can hardly conceal its excitement that this is the very same material that had just been used on the new elephant house at London Zoo. In similarly excited terms we are told of exotic materials such as ‘grit-blasted’ and even ‘fair-faced’ concrete. Innovations such as electrical road heating on the Woolwich Road Flyover (blimey…) emergency telephones and traffic surveillance equipment would be installed. Truly a Seventies Dream” ((extract from “The Greenwich Phantom”)) .
Let us go back for now to the debate in the House of Common, where at the end of 1971 we find the Labour MP for Woolwich West, William Hamling questioning the GLC planning of radial system to the then under-secretary of state for environment, Mr Michael Heseltine. Here, the concerns for Eltham being closed off by a box of road and lorries going around the streets of Greenwich sound very actual indeed, and if it wasn’t for the price of property (£ 10,000 circa) we would not imagine this discourse as being articulated a long time ago:
“…If one looks at the motorway map for London one can see that this network will cause a tremendous change in the character of London. It will isolate thousands and thousands of homes. We shall be involved in the destruction of many houses, many of them modern houses, perfectly desirable houses, houses which, in a free market today, command prices of ¬£10,000. It is not just the destruction of homes; it is the destruction of urban life as we know it, and the emergence of an urban life which is unreal, artificial and unacceptable to the people of London.
This is something which the planners do not always understand. After all, most of the people who talk and write about these plans do not themselves live in London. They do not live in the areas which will be so drastically affected. Those of us who live in London, who live with the ordinary people of London and who know where the shoe pinches do not accept that this kind of concept can lead to anything but the carving up of London once again and the emergence of a pattern of urban life which is uncivilised and dehumanised. The prospect of 40- and 50-ton lorries coming off the motorways and going through Plumstead, Charlton and Greenwich fills me with horror” ((MOTORWAYS, LONDON House of Commons Deb 15 December 1971 vol 828 cc746-64 746v)) .
I found this extract particularly touching, for its actuality and ability to foresee what in fact happened. Find more current pictures in my photoblog, in particular my impression of the footbridge. As marginal note to our discussion, there are also proposals in the same debate to facilitate travel fares for elderly people, or the few pennies bus fare for all in order to relaunch the public transport system as an alternative to private transport, and the concerns for the deserted river (sounds familiar? now at least there is a chance to travel fast on the Clipper, while drinking a glass of champagne!)….
Anyway, the end of our story is that the few bits of the radial system to be implemented were the south part of the Ringroad 1, with an additional top-up in the golden age of the LDDC: ‘When the Ringway plans were dropped, the traffic situation in Eltham was so bad that the former A2(M) plan was resurrected and the ensuing construction works were the largest and most complex new road in London in the 1980s’. The rest was blend into the disastrous M25, but this is another story… ((many more details here: the CBRD website is an amateur’s project and they have done a wonderful work of post-industrial archaeology on the planning of the Ringroads or Radial System. They also say: ‘From some perspectives it’s starting to look like the project wasn’t just halted, but comprehensively destroyed – either to prevent further bad publicity or simply to reduce storage costs’)) .
Tagged Blakwall Tunnel, community, flyover, footpath, greenwich, LDDC, motorway, peninsula, planning, rim, ringroad, sustainability
P.S. from 
