The Pedways that nearly destroyed the city
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled “The Ringways that nearly destroyed Inner London”.
It was about an extraordinary project to blight a million homes by criss-crossing inner London with full-scale motorways. What was so remarkable about this plan was that they actually started building them.
Well, even more remarkably, while inner London was threatened by Ringways, the historic core of the City was simultaneously threatened by Pedways.
Have you ever wondered what that weird footbridge near Liverpool Street is for? This one:
After all, there’s no need for a footbridge when there’s a perfectly good pedestrian crossing below - and it’s not totally obvious how anyone’s meant to get up to it.
Well, believe it or not, this is one of only a few remaining hints of a jaw-dropping transformation of the City of London that so nearly happened that it was actually started.
The inspiration was one of the most influential books on town planning ever published. Colin Buchanan, in Traffic in Towns in 1964, argued pedestrians get in the way of traffic and that the prime streetspace should be reserved for cars, with pedestrians herded behind fences or, ideally, taken out of the streets altogether.
Just one year later in 1965, the City of London Corporation changed the rules for planning consent in the City of London. No new buildings would be approved unless they included a network of pedestrian walkways at first-floor level, and bridges sprouting across the adjacent roads. The idea was that these bridges would then link up with the walkways in the next building and so on.
The vision was that the entire City would be connected at first-floor level by these “Pedways” and the streets below, still laid out to the original streetplan of medieval London, would be reserved for cars, able to move at speed.
Surviving Pedway-era block on Pudding Lane, with first floor level walkway and link bridge
Incredibly, this dystopian vision was started. Over a dozen pedways were built at various locations across the City before it was realised that the whole thing was both ludicrously ambitious and thoroughly undesirable. Most of these dozen have since been scrapped but some, like the bridge near Liverpool Street, survive as weird bridges to no-where.
2013 documentary by Chris Bevan Lee on the pedway scheme
Of course, when I say over a dozen were built, I’m ignoring the extraordinary apotheosis of the pedway project: the Barbican.
The entire Aldersgate area of the City was destroyed by bombing in World War II; the replacement development was built entirely to the Pedway concept. The ground floor was reserved for traffic, and people were lifted up to the first floor.
London Wall, which runs alongside the Barbican, is the ultimate pedway paradise; the only realisation of the planners’ postwar vision.
Had they not just relied on planning consents but actually put some money behind it, the whole City could look like this.
