As Dom Hallas leads me towards his block of flats, he glances up at the exterior, an endless expanse of dull, brown bricks interrupted by a few tiny windows and a curious-looking zigzag design picked out in lighter stone. “It’s true,” Hallas admits, opening the heavy security door with an electronic fob. “When I tell people where I live, some do say: ‘Oh, I always thought that was Brixton prison.’”
It is an easy mistake to make. Southwyck House, only nine storeys high but almost 250 metres long, looms like a gigantic wall just outside the centre of Brixton. It is one of south London’s most obvious and, it has to be said, forbidding landmarks.
Known locally as the Barrier Block, the building looks that way for a reason. It is an almost accidental relic of an alternative history for London, one that would have made the city very different and, as most people would probably agree, significantly less appealing.
This slab of roadside frontage was designed to be not just social housing but also a vast acoustic shield, screening the neighbourhood from the deafening roar of an elevated, eight-lane urban motorway.
If events had turned out differently, Southwyck House would be perched on the edge of the Motorway Box, a 50-mile, eight-lane ring road built across much of inner suburban London, including Brixton. This was only part of the planners’ ambitions. The Box, or Ringway One as it was later titled, was to be the first of three concentric gyratories. Together they would have displaced up to 100,000 people.
The idea sounds almost fantastical now and very few Londoners today have even heard of what would have been the largest one-off civil engineering project ever undertaken in the capital. But it very nearly happened.
When the project eventually unravelled in 1973, thanks to efforts by pioneering anti-roads campaigners plus some political luck, Lambeth council had already designed Southwyck House and cleared the land for it to be built. And so it was, a decision finally approved by a certain John Major, the 30-year-old chair of the council’s planning committee.
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.
I live just over 100 metres from where the road would have passed through Denmark Hill in south London. It would have obliterated much of a popular local park before smashing through the Giles Gilbert Scott-designed Salvation Army college and several rows of Georgian homes. Opening my bedroom window would have brought an immediate, unignorable traffic roar.
Baffling as the idea might seem now, it must be viewed in the context of a time when politicians and planners were panicked about imminent gridlock across the UK’s towns and cities as ever more vehicles took to the roads.
The solution they collectively turned to was the inner-city motorway, an innovation that arguably changed postwar cities as fundamentally as modernist architects’ tower blocks. Here was an entirely new type of street, one that did away with shop fronts, pedestrians, chance encounters or indeed anything recognisably human-scale. For the first time in centuries of urban life, a street was not a public realm, just a conduit between private spaces.
Other cities had got there already. As early as 1927, Robert Moses, the vastly powerful planner who may well have changed New York City more than any single individual, built his first “parkway”, the innocuous-sounding official term for a new type of high speed, car-only urban road. In a 44-year municipal career, Moses oversaw the construction of more than 400 miles of such routes through New York and deep into the suburbs, displacing hundreds of thousands of largely poorer local people, a process he later likened to hacking through the urban landscape “with a meat axe”.
The British urban motorway age properly began in 1960, when Ernest Marples, Harold Macmillan’s maverick transport minister, tasked a polymath engineer turned civil servant called Colin Buchanan to look into the growing urban congestion crisis and how it might be solved. His eventual report, Traffic in Towns, was published in 1963 and proved so unexpectedly popular it was reproduced as an abridged paperback, selling tens of thousands of copies.
Buchanan is seen in retrospect, perhaps unfairly, as the patron saint of the UK’s urban motorway age. But Traffic in Towns did much more than simply set out ways a city could road-build its way out of gridlock. It also urged politicians to consider whether such solutions were actually worth it.
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.”
The planners were ready. One of the most striking things about the Motorway Box is that there was no pivotal figure behind its development, or even a definitive record of someone suggesting it. The idea seemed to emerge as a consensus within the London County Council (LCC), the citywide local authority, after traffic surveys showed a higher than expected proportion of vehicles in the city centre were just passing through and could be channelled around its edge instead.
Even when the route was first sketched out, knowledge of it remained confined to the roads department. The first the LCC’s municipal architects heard about it was when they unveiled plans for a housing estate in Clapham Junction, south London, and had to be quietly taken aside and told that one part might need to be moved so it did not sit in the middle of an eight-lane highway.
It was only in 1965 that the LCC’s replacement, the Greater London Council (GLC), first told a surprised if initially impressed public about the Motorway Box. The plan was soon expanded to take in two further loops: another motorway-grade circuit slightly further out, using the routes of the North and South Circular roads, and a final orbital along part of what would, two decades later, become the M25.
By 1969 they had names: Ringways One, Two and Three. The proposal was supported by Labour and the Conservatives, who between them held all the GLC seats. In Westminster, the Labour government of Harold Wilson was defined by its love for modern infrastructure and had increased the road-building budget to its highest-ever postwar level. London’s destiny seemed set.
This was about more than just a ring road, however big. The capital was on the verge of being definitively tipped into a post-Buchanan future, one where entire areas could be rebuilt for the convenience of the car.
* * *
At the Lambeth council archives, in a side room of one of its smaller libraries, you can get a glimpse of this parallel London as envisioned half a century ago, in the form of a three-dimensional model built by council planners in 1968. Made from plywood and cardboard set into a wooden base, the tiny cityscape is defiantly modern, showing rows of broad, slab-like buildings, a series of massive tower blocks rising above them. Through the middle runs a multi-lane elevated motorway.
Shown this without any prior knowledge, you might suspect it was Brasília, or perhaps a new part of Shanghai. But this was the new Brixton, as reimagined for the urban motorway age. It involved demolishing just about all the existing commercial centre, with new retail and residential infrastructure built one level above the roads, including a series of 52-storey tower blocks.
Perhaps even more than the Motorway Box, the Brixton plan exemplifies what looks in retrospect like sheer hubris on the part of the planners. Setting aside whether locals in an area long defined by its street-based life and markets even wanted to move everything to raised walkways, it would have taken up 10% of the UK’s entire town centre redevelopment budget.
Unsurprisingly, not much was achieved before the Motorway Box was scrapped. In the end, apart from Southwyck House, the only part to become reality was Brixton’s brick-and-concrete modernist recreation centre, and even this was only completed in 1985.
As the GLC and Lambeth dreamed of their concrete utopias, the world around them was changing. Several decades ahead in the urban game, New Yorkers had become tired of Robert Moses’ endless highways, bridges and tunnels, none of which seemed to make the city’s notorious traffic any better.
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.
Such radical ideas were less embedded in London, and opposition to the Ringways came mainly from a string of small and fragmented local campaigns. But a near-miracle was at hand. In 1970, with the GLC on the verge of starting construction, Wilson’s government unexpectedly ordered a public inquiry, seemingly spooked by the scale of what was about to be done.
The inquiry eventually ruled that the Motorway Box should go ahead, if not the outer loops. But crucially, it gave opponents two years to coalesce under the banner of the London Motorway Action Group (LMAG). This was led by Labour MP Douglas Jay, whose inspired tactic was to focus less on persuading the public and more on changing minds within a much smaller but more influential constituency: the London Labour party.
Many Labour-run councils were already deeply worried. While the official estimate was that 20,000 households would be displaced by the Ringways, an LMAG analysis put it at 100,000, and there was no apparent plan for how, and where, these people were going to live. It was also becoming clear that Buchanan’s predictions about growing car use were overstated. By 1970, rather than his expected 18.5m vehicles on the UK’s roads, there were 13.5m.
Concerns had not been eased by the arrival of the Westway, the two-and-a-half-mile elevated motorway intended to connect the western side of the Motorway Box to central London. A reduced budget for rehousing households along its route meant that Michael Heseltine, the young and very junior transport minister dispatched in July 1970 to formally open the road, was greeted by a vast banner reading “Get us out of this hell”, draped across the top of a terrace of homes just 25 metres from the eight lanes of traffic.
By 1971 Jay had persuaded the association of Labour-run London councils to oppose the Ringways. In June 1972, this position was adopted by the party’s GLC group. But Labour was now in opposition. Both the ruling GLC Conservatives and Ted Heath’s Tory government wanted to press ahead.
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.
Apart from Southwyck House, a few ghosts of this alternative London exist. In Shepherd’s Bush, west London, the A3220 road turns mysteriously and briefly into a motorway, connecting to the Westway at a huge roundabout that still has the stubs of a slipway where the ring road was to head east. On the other side of the city, a small stretch of the Box was built between 1967 and 1970, from Hackney Wick to Kidbrooke.
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.
* * *
We now live in a very different urban era. Most UK cities have shifted definitively towards the Jane Jacobs idea of streets as a venue for life, not a means of high-speed travel. And with this has come gentrification.
Like many similar blocks, Southwyck House saw years of neglect and decline. But its proximity to central Brixton, plus the fact it faces out on to the fashionable restaurants and bars of Coldharbour Lane rather than an eight-lane road, means flats there can change hands for up to £400,000.
Dom Hallas shows me around the interior of his apartment, nestled across three floors, the living space and bedrooms flooded with light from floor-to-ceiling south-facing windows. In contrast, the few windows looking northwards towards the road are tiny and double-glazed, connected only to corridors or the bathroom and recessed into a sprawling exterior intended to muffle and deflect a 24-hour cacophony of noise that never came. “It’s actually a lovely place to live,” Hallas says, leading me out to a sunny balcony. “Particularly without a motorway next door.”
One of the many paradoxes of Southwyck House is that the man who ultimately decided it should exist became such a trenchant critic of its architecture. In 1995, as prime minister, John Major made a speech condemning what he called the “grey, sullen concrete wastelands” of inner cities.
The comments greatly amused Magda Borowiecka, the pioneering Polish-born architect who led the design team for Southwyck House and has spent the decades since battling against having her career defined by a building most people simply don’t understand.
Borowiecka was given just a year to draw up the plans, drawing inspiration from Sheffield’s famous Park Hill estate, with flats that span the width of the building and are spread over several floors, slotting together like a three-dimensional puzzle. Now 92 and still living in Lambeth, a couple of miles from her creation, she is quietly proud of how she tackled the task.
“The thing that has annoyed me all this time is that so many more people see it from the outside than they do from the inside. It’s so much nicer inside,” she says.
While Southwyck House is now seen as something of a defining Brixton landmark – a local brewery even uses its zigzag brick motif on its cans of lager – the block’s unlikely origins and mixed history exemplify the way critics of modernism, such as Major, can focus on the wrong target.
The postwar rebuilding of so many UK towns was not just a story about tower blocks; it was also about rapid motor traffic. In Ville Radieuse, Le Corbusier’s 1930 manifesto for a rational new form of city, the high priest of modernism was explicit that his uniform skyscrapers should be connected to road arteries that prioritised vehicle flow, with only minimal smaller streets because “crossroads are an enemy to traffic”.
Modernism could, theoretically, have happened without wholesale car use. But the personal motor vehicle – sleek, functional and mass-produced – was central to the way cities were rebuilt, not trundling meekly along a local street but moving at speed on an urban motorway, the bare concrete and soaring pillars echoing the buildings around them.
However, as Borowiecka has learned, when fashions change it is the architects who tend to bear the brunt rather than the road engineers. “Southwyck House is a unique building, and it was a unique project to be given,” she says. “People see it and think, ‘Why does it look like that?’ And the answer is very simple: it was the car. The car made it all.”
