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The idea of the Motorway Box had first emerged a decade before, as the UK headed towards the peak of a near-mania for car-based urban design. A squashed rectangle nine miles across, much of it hoisted on to concrete viaducts and spanning up to 30 metres at junctions, it would have run through areas including Earl’s Court, Clapham Junction, Brixton, Blackheath, Hackney Wick, Dalston, Camden and Kilburn.
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In congested metropolises such as London, Buchanan warned, to guarantee free-flowing traffic would mean entire districts being compulsorily purchased, levelled and rebuilt, with shops and businesses set on walkways one level above huge motorways and parking garages. This would, he noted with some understatement, require “an almost revolutionary approach to questions of land ownership”. Politicians could instead consider measures to curb urban car use, for example better public transport or road pricing.
But Marples was less interested in such nuanced warnings than in the report’s prediction that the total number of motor vehicles in the UK would soar from 10.5m in 1963 to 18m just seven years later. “We have to face the fact that, whether we like it or not, the way we have built our towns is entirely the wrong way for motor traffic,” Marples told a planning conference. “We want an entirely different type of town.”
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In 1969, while the Ringways plan was being finalised, New York’s mayor, John Lindsay, scrapped Moses’ proposal for a massive freeway across lower Manhattan, after pressure from a new breed of activists who had started to ask, for the first time in the automobile era, whether cities should be designed around motor vehicles or human beings.
Most prominent was Jane Jacobs, the visionary urbanist and writer whose idea of a successful city centred on a necessarily organic and unplanned “ballet” of street-based life proved hugely influential in subsequent decades.
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It all came down to the next GLC election, in April 1973. Helped by another Jay tactic – he persuaded a series of independent anti-road candidates to stand down and avoid splitting the vote – Labour won 58 seats against 32 for the Conservatives. The Motorway Box was dropped. Six months later the oil crisis sent petrol prices rocketing, and spending on roads was slashed. The scheme was history.
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Elsewhere across the UK, of course, the planners had their way. Birmingham’s “concrete collar” of an inner ring road was opened in 1971. By this point, vehicles had been roaring through Glasgow on the M8 for several years. Leeds even branded itself “the motorway city of the 70s”, which was stamped on outgoing mail.
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