VISUAL CULTURE
Westway; Caught in the Speed Trap
Sandy McCreery; 1995; ‘Westway; caught in the speed trap’; in Strangely Familiar; edited by Borden, Kerr, Pivaro & Rendell; Routledge; London; pp.37-41; ISBN 0-415-14418-3,
Westway; Caught in the Speed Trap
Snaking through the inner-city area of North Kensington, Westway is possibly London’s most dramatic work of engineering. Employing advanced technology, Britain’s longest elevated motorway was the most significant achievement of the Greater London Council’s highways programme. Their publicists promoted the scheme optimistically, particularly as a twenty year programme of motorways was planned for London: the Ringways. This success story could run and run.
In 1968 Prince Charles visited the site, and the project’s engineer was the subject of a television documentary. The previous year Desmond Plummer, the Council Leader, had posed ebulliently with a group of visiting schoolgirls. Usually, Council publicity featured the social groupings that were benefiting directly from new schemes; nuclear families on housing estates, the elderly in day centres, for example. However, the girls at Westway were clearly too young to drive. They were there to suggest the future, for this was a project of social change. Indeed the Ringway proposals were largely antithetical to stable society. They were about movement and freedom, and, in particular, the personal freedom offered through private consumption.
When plans for Westway were first published in 1951, the Ministry of Transport tended to see roads as a rural problem; cities were comparatively well served by public transport links. Indeed communication had always been the basis of cities. Initially, a matter of proximity, during the nineteenth century railways enabled cities to expand, and London emerged as the world’s first metropolis. Modern urban life, with millions of people circulating in a maelstrom of exchange, was radically different to that of the village. Modernism celebrated the freedom offered by this anonymity. Cities, mobility and a new level of personal freedom came to be seen as inseparable.
The high-priest of modernist architecture, Le Corbusier, sought to enhance the urban experience by speeding up the city, proposing urban motorways in the 1920s. And this extreme social environment arrived in Britain with the first rural motorways built in the 1950s. On them, unwelcome social interaction was not just unlikely, it was largely impossible. You had to follow everyone else, but the sense of freedom from them was unique.
The economic logic was to increase profit accumulation through faster rates of inter-city circulation. But around 1960 the Ministry of Transport changed strategy. New roads, it was realised, not only encouraged exchange, but were also important sites of consumption in themselves. Britain was the world’s second largest producer of motor vehicles, and as export competition hardened the home market was increasingly important. If cars were to be sold to city dwellers they had to be given the space to use them. Urban motorways were now on the government’s agenda. In 1961 funding was finally approved for Westway.
But in the city, contradictions inherent to capitalism were graphically exposed through the motorway proposals. The tensions between public and private, social responsibility and anonymous freedom, community stability and personal mobility, exploded into a minor revolution in North Kensington. Westway was not the political triumph intended. A carefully nurtured local success story became a global humiliation. For the road builders had run into a neighbourhood that sought social recognition before freedom from society, that valued sleeping, breathing and playing before cars, and that put communal amenity before private privilege. It also grasped the one potential benefit of Westway: public visibility.
In the language of the time, North Kensington was a “twilight area�?. Half its households had a bathroom, less than 10% a car, and the majority rented from private landlords. After the 1957 Rent Act de-controlled new tenancies, unscrupulous landlords in the area, such as Peter Rachmann, pressurised tenants to vacate in order to re-let at higher rents. In response, several tenants associations were formed which gradually developed into two highly politicised community groups, one chaired by George Clarke, the other by John O’Malley.
Clarke and O’Malley began to actively resist the motorway when it emerged that, despite the glossy images of spacious green parks, the builders were constructing commuter car parks beneath the carriageway, on land already used informally as a children’s play space. Their groups were able to legally challenge further work after discovering that the Council had not sought planning permission from itself. Construction was delayed for six expensive weeks, until the Council capitulated, accepting that the space be put to community use. Without these actions, public amenities such as Portobello Green covered market and the Westway Sports Centre would not exist today.
Their most spectacular triumph, however, was delivered at the opening ceremony. Television viewers as far afield as Australia saw the official cavalcade ridiculed with a barrage of insults. Later over a hundred demonstrators fooled police by driving up the exit slip road and along the wrong side of the carriageway to the ceremonial ribbon. They left after reassurances from Michael Heseltine that the Ministry of Transport would visit their homes to re-assess the impact of Westway. Two weeks later, having heard nothing, the protestors were back, parading along the hard shoulder, and holding up the traffic. Four demonstrators were charged with causing obstruction, but the court sympathetically imposed nominal fines of £1.
Indeed, sympathy became almost the official line on Westway. Just before the ribbon-cutting, the dignitaries attended a public meeting where speaker after speaker apologised for the suffering imposed upon North Kensington. The Transport Minister hoped that “those who use this road will spare a thought for those for whom it is not a blessing�?. The following day, all the serious newspapers carried leaders on Westway, and all appeared to share a collective guilt. Just why had planners and politicians chosen to subject these people to environmental devastation, rather than ensure they had the most basic amenities? The Times concluded that it was “a bad advertisement for the GLC’s controversial programme of urban motorways.�?
In terms of publicity, Clarke and O’Malley were the victors. Their actions helped spark a widespread revulsion towards modernist urban motorways. Of the proposed Ringways, only the M25 skirting London has been built. Although a government enquiry favoured the “Box�?, the inner Ringway, a new Greater London Council was elected in 1973 largely on its promise to abandon the proposals. The connecting slip roads to the “Box�? still hang aimlessly off one end of Westway. Community had slowed a particularly private mobility.
(c) Sandy McCreery