The West Cross Route would have been a motorway through inner West London, running from Willesden Junction in the north to Battersea in the south.
One part was built, and is still known as the “West Cross Route” today, linking the A40 Westway to the Holland Park Roundabout. It is classified A3220 but once held the designation M41.
Intended to form the western side of Ringway 1, the West Cross Route is distinctive among the GLC’s motorway plans in having come very close to construction. While many of the Ringway projects were only progressed as far as route selection or design work, the West Cross Route went through several rounds of design and refinement, and reached a point where it had been programmed for work, with a start date set, and draft legal orders were made. It was halted because it fell within the remit of the Greater London Development Plan Inquiry, but had it not done so there is every reason to think that most of it would have been open to traffic by about 1975.
- Origins
- Designs 1963
- Revised plan for two-stage construction
- Legal orders and timetabling
- References
Origins
The motorway plan has its origins in the London County Council Development Plan of 1951. Produced in an era where there was little money or political will for road improvements, and in the aftermath of the LCC’s flagship road project, the Arterial “A” Ring, having been killed off by the government, its ambitions were extremely modest.
Some limited improvement schemes were proposed, but one of the key themes of the Plan was the designation of certain corridors for traffic circulation, following existing streets, that loosely echoed the many new roads that had been recommended by the Greater London Development Plan of 1944 but which the LCC was powerless to build1.
Names may have been applied to these routes when they were created, but they had without doubt been settled by the Plan’s next major review in 1960. They may have been created by the Committee on London Roads (the Nugent Committee) in 1957-59. At any rate, by 1960, the map showed Inner London criss-crossed with corridors, including an Inner Circuit Route, an East-West Cross Route and others. One line in West London, linking Shepherd’s Bush and Chelsea by existing streets, was the West Cross Route.
Following the Nugent Committee’s report in 1959, the LCC’s ambitions for roadbuilding grew steadily. The Committee had recommended improving the West Cross Route between the A40 and the Thames on existing streets, but as the LCC began contemplating urban motorway plans, the concept of relieving the West Cross with a purpose-built motorway began to evolve.
Motorway spur
The first stage in the West Cross becoming a road in its own right came in 1959 as part of developing plans for the Western Avenue Extension2. The existing plans for this project had been sketched in the 1930s, envisioning a bridge across the railway east of Wood Lane and then the commandeering of existing residential streets to form a one-way system linking Western Avenue to Marylebone Road. By the late 1950s these were being re-evaluated.
The most basic revisions looked to build the railway bridge and then find more humane ways to route a major new road through the terraced streets of Kensington, but the next iteration was the construction of an elevated road alongside the Metropolitan Line railway tracks instead. In 1959 a further innovation was the addition of a trumpet interchange near Latimer Road, just east of the West London Line railway, from which a dual carriageway spur ran south to a crossroads at the site of what is now Holland Park Roundabout. The plan labels this spur “West Cross Route” so there is no doubt about its purpose or its place in the evolution of the motorway.
Ironically the only length of West Cross Route to have been built is the section shown as a spur on the 1959 plan.
The London County Council’s ambitions continued to grow, and in very short order they were considering not a series of isolated improvements to existing roads, as recommended by Nugent, but an entire urban motorway network.
In order to develop the short spur from the Western Avenue Extension into a motorway that could relieve the whole West Cross Route, and form an integral part of a wider network, the LCC engaged Husband and Co., a firm of consultant engineers, to draw up plans for a motorway from Shepherd’s Bush to the Thames. Implicit was that the route would continue over the Thames to Battersea, but the consultants’ remit ended at the north bank of the river, perhaps because the length north of the Thames was considered a viable project in its own right.
Designs 1963
3
Revised plan for two-stage construction
4
Legal orders and timetabling
5