The Decline and Fall of Ringway 2
You are here: Home - Histories - The Decline and Fall of Ringway 2
In the 1960s, the Greater London Council put forward a series of astonishingly ambitious plans for a network of urban motorways which would cross the city so densely that they were in danger of making London look like it was wearing a tarmac string vest. The main part of this plan was the Ringways - four of them, making loops around the heart of London. Ringway 1 was the 'London Box', a tight loop ringing Westminster and the City, and Ringway 2 was the upgrade to the North and South Circulars.
Ringway 3 included the Dartford Crossing, and Ringway 4 was further out in open countryside, to be built by the Ministry of Transport. What we now know as the M25 is parts of Ringway 3 (in the east and north) and Ringway 4 (in the south and west). Ringway 1 never materialised. Ringway 2 is the other one: just what happened to it? This page takes a section of its route in the south and finds out.
The original Ringway plan in 1969. Click to enlarge.
Once Upon A Time
In the 1960s the Greater London Council (GLC) received the result of a report that recommended the construction of a series of ring roads to help London cope with traffic congestion well into the future. The plans it adopted involved building three of these - the outermost would be the responsibility of national government, and the other two, Ringway 1 near the centre and Ringway 2 further out, would be built by the GLC.
Its aim was the build them by roughly the end of the 1970s, when it predicted traffic on the capital's existing road network would reach breaking point without the new roads. The GLC saw its plan as revolutionary and crucial to London's development. It had the new routes as three and four lane motorways, built in deep cuttings, at ground level or high on pillars. On wasteland and on rooftops, by railways and rivers, wherever space could be found or houses could be demolished, the motorways would be built, for the greater good of Greater London.
Planning
Deciding a new route south of the river was not easy. There was no simple way, there was certainly no obvious alignment it could follow, and the current route of the south circular was not an option as it was for the A406 in the north, where Ringway 2 would be a simple upgrade of the north circular. The only way was to pick a line and follow it - to mirror railway lines and to buy up golf courses, and for the rest of the route, to draw a line and bulldoze every building that stood in the way.
When the plans were revealed, Croydon Council was outraged, not least because it only saw detailed plans when they were printed in the Croydon Advertiser. The new road was to veer a long way south of the South Circular and seriously interfere with a large area of Croydon. By not just failing to consult Croydon about the plans, but completely failing to even pass the completed plans onto the Council, the GLC went a very long way to losing favour at a time when it could really have done with friends in high places.
The Route
Printed in the Croydon Advertiser on July 17th 1969 were detailed plans of Ringway 2 - showing every interchange and every house to be demolished on large-scale Ordnance Survey maps across a four page spread. The shock of the hundreds of people who looked for their house in the paper and saw a thick black line drawn steadily across it must have been terrifying, and the very real drop in property values for the buildings inked out on that map was reported a short time later. Reprinted here probably for the first time since then is the detailed route of Ringway 2's southern section.
The stage was then set: the GLC had made its plans and the people of south London now knew, in the goriest of detail, whether they would have to step aside for the motorway. All that had to be done was to get through the planning stage and all would be well - easy as that!
The Battle
The GLC wasn't in the least bit surprised when protests came, frequently from people who were affected by the new route, against the building of Ringway 2. It had the sense to launch publicity about the route shortly before the public inquiry stage started to help make sure opinion stayed positive.
The July 17th edition of the Croydon Advertiser noted (under the subheading "Homes will disappear") that "2,189 homes will be demolished and schools, churches, playing fields, sports grounds, swimming baths, public halls, allotments will be taken or affected to some degree". The cost in 1969 of building Ringway 2 between the A2 and A23 was estimated at £160m, including £33m just for buying up property and rehousing people. The GLC had an uphill struggle.
- Robert Vigars, Chairman of the GLC Planning and Transportation Committee, 1969
The GLC also promised it would landscape the route considerably and attempt (as much as is possible with eight lanes of fast moving traffic amidst suburban houses and gardens) to blend the road into its surroundings. To be fair many parts of the plan stuck the road in deep cuttings which would have provision to be roofed over, effectively putting the road underground where it wouldn't bother anyone. In many cases it ran alongside railway lines which already dissected neighbourhoods to prevent splitting the area up further.
The GLC also printed booklets about the proposed road, distributed widely in the area, trumpeting the wonderful traffic advantages of a motorway just behind your garden shed and detailing how the road would connect up with the GLC's other plans. The booklet's centrefold had two large glossy photos, showing "old and new", using the already-built A102(M) Blackwall Tunnel Approach Roads to demonstrate how Ringway 2 would move three 1960's lorries from a high street to a deserted motorway.
Click to enlarge.
By today's practised eyes, not wonderfully convincing arguments, considering those three lorries might just have been sat at traffic lights and that a motorway within 50 yards was never a major selling point for a 30's semi in Norbury even in 1969. And indeed, the public then were not convinced. A public meeting as part of the inquiry, held in 1971, was recalled some time later in the newspaper:
Croydon Advertiser, 8th September 1972
Similar opposition was faced along the entire route, and in the five short years (short in motorway planning terms at least) between 1967 and 1972 the plan went from conception to coffin. The same issue of the paper reported the cancellation of Ringway 2 in the south, saying "jubilation at the lifting of the motorway threat from the northern part of the borough will be loud and long". By this time the costs had risen to £419m - over three times the 1969 estimate - and work was continually pushed back as the planning inquiry dragged painfully onward, bogged down in complaints and outcries.
The GLC's cut-back plan in 1972 redrew the map, dropping Ringway 2's southern flank and Ringway 1's northern one. This was desperation now; the remaining sections of Ringways 1 and 2 would have to cope with the traffic of the missing sections too. The new plan would shorten the life of the Ringways, bringing them to capacity at a much earlier date and removing their effects in crucial parts of London. It also put other plans in jeopardy.
The revised Ringway plan from 1972. Click to enlarge.
Without Ringway 2, the Ministry of Transport was literally at a loose end: it had plans to build the M23 north as far as Streatham, but it would dump all of its traffic onto the existing A23 at Streatham without Ringway 2 as a terminus. To try and solve the problem, the GLC's revised plan included an extension of the M23 even further north to Ringway 1, which had previously only been an upgrade of the existing A23. If Ringway 2 was thrown out, this new motorway scheme stood no chance with the already fired-up population of South London.
What happened to the M23 next is well documented on the M23's history section, but to cut a long story short, by 1980 the then Department of Transport had given up all hope of completing the route because its only remaining option was to terminate the road on the existing South Circular, which was completely unacceptable in traffic terms.
The plans once hailed as breakthroughs, as definite go-ahead solutions to the economy and traffic problems of south London, were all but done with. The GLC finally conceded in the late 1970's that the Ringways would not be built, and in an attempt to sound like they were fine with this, declared no road improvements in south London would be necessary now that the government was pushing through as high-priority plans for the M25 orbital route in the south - the erstwhile Ringway 4.
As it has become increasingly clear since that assertion was made, that was simply not true.
Chris
