The eastern side of Ringway 2 can be broken into two logical sections based on the authorities responsible for it. This section, from the M11 at Woodford Interchange to the A13 near Beckton, was a Trunk Road project promoted by the Ministry of Transport; south from Beckton, across the river to Thamesmead and onward to South London was a GLC project. The two parts were designed to work together as a whole, but were, administratively, two very separate projects.

The M11-A13 section of Ringway 2 has its origins in Bressey’s 1937 Highway Development Plan, and went through several iterations before becoming part of Ringway 2. Following the demise of the Ringways, it was quickly resurrected as a Trunk Road scheme to extend the North Circular and construct the East London River Crossing, and while the bridge was never built, this length did open to traffic in the late 1980s.

Origin in the Highway Development Plan

This route did not appear in Hellard’s pre-war list of Arterial Road schemes, and instead appears to have originated with Bressey in 1937. In his Highway Development Plan, Bressey included Route 38, titled “Woolwich Ferry (Northern Approach) and River Crossing (Woolwich)”¹.

Route 38 was, on first sight, something of a mongrel, and not necessarily directly related to the road that is now the eastern side of the North Circular. It began in Wanstead, following the existing A1008, A114 and A116 to Manor Park. There, at the existing junction of the A118 Romford Road with residential streets Rabbits Road and Fourth Avenue, Bressey suggested an urban cloverleaf junction. It would then commandeer a series of suburban streets, with new railway bridges at East Ham, to arrive at a trumpet junction on the A13 near Beckton.

A short hop westwards along the A13 led to a roundabout, from which the route followed the A117 south, branching off to take a circuitous route along the river to North Woolwich. There is then an awkward doubling-back to enter a new tunnel to Woolwich, at the far end of which the route connected to Bressey’s Route 2, an improved South Circular.

While the route of Bressey’s proposal was quite different to the roads that came later, the purpose was effectively the same. In 1937 the North Circular did not have an eastern side – it extended to Gants Hill on the A12, where it stopped; meanwhile its route number A406 branched off the North Circular at Waterworks Corner to follow existing suburban roads south to the Green Man at Wanstead where it too stopped. The South Circular, meanwhile, did not exist at all – the name only referred to a road that hadn’t yet been built², which Bressey called Route 2. Even then, previous plans, such as Hellard’s, had no plans for the North and South Circulars to meet.

In that context Bressey’s intention is clear: Route 38 aims to replace the Woolwich Ferry with a fixed crossing, and use it to close the gap between the two Circulars, creating one ring road around London. His route goes to Wanstead in the north, which was the limit of one Circular road, and to Woolwich in the south, the limit of the other and a place where there was sufficient demand for a fixed crossing of the Thames to be justified.

If its route is awkward and unpromising to modern eyes – being mainly upgrades of existing roads, including some fairly horrifying use of terraced residential streets – its junctions tell a different story. Across London, Bressey predominantly suggested roundabouts for major junctions, and while he was aware of the concept of grade separation, he largely considered it unsuitable for urban roads and his plans place just a handful of grade-separated interchanges very sparingly across the metropolis. But two are on Route 38.

Creation of the “C” Ring Road

When Patrick Abercrombie came to write the County of London Plan in 1943 and then the Greater London Plan in 1944, he drew heavily on Bressey’s work³. Unlike Bressey, who drew in roads wherever his surveys indicated a requirement, Abercrombie’s plans had more overall structure. He created a series of concentric ring roads, lettered A to E, of which the “C” Ring was a redrawing of plans for the North and South Circular Roads.

In the east, he adapted Bressey’s Route 38. Abercrombie’s “C” Ring branched off the North Circular at Waterworks Corner, following the existing Woodford New Road and Whipps Cross Road to Wanstead, but south of there he drew a smooth new line through Wanstead Flats and then out to the Roding Valley near Ilford. This enabled him to bypass Manor Park and East Ham completely, travelling through open land to the A13; he then suggested a new line for a river crossing at Gallions Reach, landing south of the Thames on the east side of Woolwich.

Adoption as a Trunk Road scheme

Hard evidence for the adoption of this route into the Trunk Road programme, and its change to follow the Roding Valley from Woodford to Beckton rather than Wanstead to Beckton, has proven elusive. However, more circumstantially, enough is known about wider developments in this part of London to draw some conclusions.

In the years following the Second World War, there were initial hopes that Abercrombie’s plans could be implemented, and Abercrombie spent some years working closely with the London County Council to integrate his plan with the Council’s activities. However, while the road network he proposed was initially adopted by the Council, they were forced to scale back their ambitions when it became clear that it was unaffordable⁴. It was also doubtful that the planning apparatus of the late 1940s was capable of delivering such wholesale redevelopment.

As a result Buchanan provides evidence that the LCC concentrated funds on existing streets that roughly followed the alignment of the “A” and “B” Rings and a selection of radial main roads. Meanwhile, in the same era the Ministry of Transport decided it needed only the west and north flanks of the “D” Ring, dropping safeguarding for the south and east sides⁵.

The “C” Ring falls between these stools and its fate is not specifically known, but there was plainly no ambition to build the South Circular as a new road, as planned before the war, since the LCC intended only junction improvements on existing roads in South London⁶; meanwhile, north of the river, the North Circular largely existed between Chiswick and Gants Hill. The “Through Routes” signposting exercise carried out by the Ministry of Transport, starting in 1950, formalised the North Circular’s extension on existing suburban roads from Waterworks Corner to the Woolwich Ferry and created the modern South Circular to meet it⁷.

For some years in the 1950s, then, there was no ambition to build anything like Abercrombie’s “C” Ring or Bressey’s Route 38. However, the Ministry were pragmatists, and not averse to resurrecting an old plan if it suited their needs. This appears to have happened in about 1964.

Prior to 1964 the Ministry’s main preoccupation in East London was the planning of the M11 and the associated Docks Relief Road. This was part of their wider strategy to provide a way for traffic from the North and Midlands to reach the docks in the East End; the plan (describe elsewhere) was for traffic approaching London to follow the “D” Ring, then the M11, and finally the Docks Relief Road. The M11 would approach London via the Lea Valley, reaching Stratford town centre, from where the Docks Relief Road would form a non-motorway continuation south to the docks themselves.

In November 1964, that plan changed: a study recommended routing the M11 via the Roding Valley instead, which meant the M11 would enter London via Woodford and Leyton. In turn this was the end of the Docks Relief Road, which would no longer offer a direct route from the North and Midlands to the docks.

At an unknown date around this time, the route between Woodford and Beckton entered the Trunk Road programme, and plainly was a successor to Route 38, the “C” Ring and the Docks Relief Road. It performed the same function as the first two – linking the North Circular, this time at Woodford, with a fixed river crossing. By 1965 it was already appearing on network plans of the London area and had been co-opted by the GLC as part of Ringway 2⁸. But it also served to link the M11, and hence the wider UK, with the docks. In 1970, a diagram of the London Traffic Survey’s 1981a network, annotated by Buchanan, even labelled it the “Docks Approach Road”⁹.

In the years that followed the Docks Relief Road was definitively dropped from the programme; the reason given was that, having the East Cross Route and Docks Approach Road parallel on either side, both offering a direct link to a river crossing, it had become redundant¹⁰.

As a result, it seems fairly safe to assume that the shift in the routing of the M11 caused the Ministry of Transport to look for a more direct connection between the motorway and the docks. Whether they considered themselves to be resurrecting part of Abercrombie’s “C” Ring, or whether they simply saw the remainder of the Roding Valley south from Woodford as a good place for a new road, the effect was the same. By the late 1960s the M11-A13 length of Ringway 2 was in the Trunk Road programme and progressing at pace.

By October 1969, the road was in the Trunk Road Preparation Pool¹¹. The listing there referred to it as “Ringway 2 (a new motorway from A.406 at South Woodford to A.13)”.

Design

Detailed design work for the route appears to have been carried out, since small extracts of large-scale plans have turned up here and there. However, plans of the whole route have not surfaced, so in part the design of the route has to be surmised from written evidence.

The overall standard of the route would have been a dual four-lane motorway – the cost estimate prepared for the GLDP Inquiry in 1972 describes it as such¹². The cost, at 1970 prices, was estimated at £34.5m. Dual four-lane motorways elsewhere, being designed by both GLC and MOT, were typically expected to have four hard shoulders – two per carriageway, with a pair in the central reservation, so it’s not unlikely that would have been the case on this road too.

Woodford Interchange’s layout was produced as part of WS Atkins’ North East London Study, which produced designs for the M11, and therefore the design of this road’s northern terminus is known. At the southern end of the project, the Ministry handed responsibility for the design of the Ringway 2/A13 interchange to the GLC¹³, and no designs for the junction have yet been found, though the suggestion is that a high capacity free-flowing layout was expected.

In between those points, the M11-A13 length of Ringway 2 would have three interchanges.

The first is Redbridge Roundabout where the road meets the A12. A two-level roundabout interchange exists here today, built in the 1970s when it was expected to be incorporated into this Trunk Road project. We can be confident that the junction is, therefore, built to the designs that were produced for this road in the 1960s.

A further modification is suggested in some drawings from the North East London Study, in which an east-west flyover is added to convert the junction to a three level stacked roundabout interchange¹⁴. It is therefore possible that this would have been the ultimate configuration of the junction.

The second is Ilford Bridge Interchange. Designs have been found for this junction, which show a two-bridge roundabout interchange connecting only to a spur road that travelled north east to the one-way system in Ilford town centre. The southbound exit sliproad would have joined the spur directly, bypassing the roundabout¹⁵. There is written evidence, as part of a submission to the GLDP Inquiry, that suggests Ringway 2 would drop a lane at this junction, regaining it afterwards, so that it would have four lanes either side but only three within Ilford Bridge Interchange¹⁶.

The third is Barking Interchange, for which no diagrams have ever been found. However, as with Ilford Bridge, written evidence exists as part of a response to an inquiry from the GLDP Inquiry Panel about costings.

The purpose of the document is to request the savings that could be made by omitting specific junctions from the design of certain routes. As part of that it specifies the things that should be deleted from each interchange in order to calculate the saving. For Barking Interchange, it reads “omit slip roads and one bridge”¹⁷.

It can be assumed that one bridge would have to remain in order for the A124 to cross Ringway 2. From this we can, therefore, surmise that Barking Interchange would have required two bridges and a set of sliproads, which in turn makes it likely that it would have been a conventional two-level roundabout interchange.

Designation as M15

Revival as Woodford-Barking Relief Road

Sources

These things in this order, probably:

• Post-Layfield https://tools.roads.org.uk/road-notes/note.php?show=note&id=684
• Complete by 1989 https://tools.roads.org.uk/road-notes/note.php?show=note&id=767

1. Bressey, C. and Lutyens, E. (1938). Highway Development Survey 1937: Greater London. London: Ministry of Transport. The route can be seen on SABRE Maps. ↩︎
2. The South Circular that exists today was created as an exercise in signposting existing streets and largely came about in the early 1950s, as part of a wider signposting programme to mitigate for the fact that the planned South Circular, and many other urban road proposals, would not be built. Someone who looks a lot like me wrote a brilliant blog post about it for London Reconnections called Signs and Sensibility. ↩︎
3. Abercrombie had his own personal copy of the Highway Development Plan, writing his name inside the front cover incase it ever went amiss. It now lives on my bookshelf. ↩︎
4. Buchanan, C. (1970). London Road Plans 1900-1970. London: Greater London Council. See for example Document Supply WQ2/0750. ↩︎
5. Demonstrated at plan 4, MT 106/117. ↩︎
6. A whole sequence of junction tinkering proposals are strung along the present-day A205 in the County of London’s 1951 Development Plan, illustrated at GLC/TD/DP/DC/43/010. ↩︎
7. MT 95/36. ↩︎
8. Shown at, for example, GLC/TD/C/P/02 (and elsewhere). ↩︎
9. As 4. ↩︎
10. Referenced on the SABRE Wiki article on Stratford Broadway Interchange. ↩︎
11. A list of North Circular schemes in the TRPP, including this one, is at GLC/DG/PTI/P/05/058. ↩︎
12. From HLG 159/2673. The table is reproduced here. ↩︎
13. Documented at MT 106/279, where there are also plans tantalisingly showing an outline that covers the maximum extent of all possible designs for the junction – but no actual information about its layout. ↩︎
14. GLC/TD/PM/CDO/07-331. ↩︎
15. Plan 2 at MT 106/286. ↩︎
16. MT 106/454. ↩︎
17. Ibid. ↩︎