Make West-Way Safe!

westway

In January 1937, a march took place over one of the safety crossings on the Westway, protesting against the high speeds on the road and lobbying for a 30mph speed limit.

The “Westway” was the colloquial name for that part of the Western Avenue between Western Circus, East Acton and where it reached its terminus at a T junction in Wood Lane, beside White City.

A pub called “The Western” was built beside Western Circus and named after it. In time a cinema called the Savoy was built on the junction and the name slowly changed to Savoy Circus, now its official name. Both the cinema and pub are gone now.

When the Western Avenue was first constructed in the 1920s, all intersections with other roads were flat junctions with roundabouts, resulting in significant congestion at busy periods.

But the “Westway” section was clear, allowing drivers to pick up a bit of speed and hence the 1937 road safety protests.

After the Second World War, increaing traffic volumes caused planners to consider a radical solution – a complex and comprehensive plan for a network of high speed roads circling and radiating out from central London designed to manage and control the flow of traffic within the capital. This plan had developed from early schemes prior to the Second World War through Patrick Abercrombie’s County of London Plan (1943) and Greater London Plan (1944) to a 1960s Greater London Council scheme that would have involved the construction of many miles of motorway standard roads across the city and demolition on a massive scale.

The existing “Westway” would be extended towards central London and built to form a link from Paddington to Ringway 1, the innermost circuit of the London Ringways network.

The route of the Westway was chosen to follow the easiest path from Western Avenue to Paddington by following the route of existing railway lines. Passing an eight lane elevated motorway through densely populated Victorian North Kensington, though, involved the clearance of a large number of buildings adjacent to the railway, particularly in the area west of Westbourne Park, where many roads were unceremoniously truncated or demolished to make way for the concrete structures.

At its opening the road was the largest continuous concrete structure in Britain, and was constructed with many advanced features, such as heating grids on slopes to control the formation of ice. It was planned and constructed in an era before environmental impacts were routinely considered, and it caused much controversy at the time for the effects it and the vehicles it carried had upon the local community and the environment. After completion a vast corridor of wasteland remained below the motorway. The North Kensington Amenity Trust was founded in 1971 to reclaim and develop this land for local community use, and since 2000 local charity Urban Eye has initiated a programme of cleaning, painting, and lighting to brighten up and improve the safety of the areas under the flyover structure.

Nowadays, Westway is the official name for a 3.5-mile long elevated dual carriageway section of the A40 trunk road in west London running from Paddington to North Kensington.

At its eastern end, Westway starts to the west of the Marylebone Flyover (A501), which takes traffic over the junction of Edgware Road (A5) and Marylebone Road (A501). Between the elevated Westway and the flyover, a short (100 m) section of surface-level road allows westbound traffic from the flyover to turn-off on to the Harrow Road (A404) or eastbound traffic from the Harrow Road to access the flyover. Eastbound traffic from Westway cannot exit here to reach the Edgware Road and continues on to the flyover.

Heading west, Westway rises sharply as it passes Paddington Green (at this point having two lanes in each direction), then crosses the Grand Union Canal branch to Paddington Basin just south of Little Venice. As the road passes Westbourne Green on the north and Royal Oak Underground Station on the south, it gains a lane as a steeply climbing slip-road from Gloucester Terrace joins. In the eastbound direction, a lane is lost as a slip-road descends to cross the Network Rail tracks to Paddington station via the large plate-girder Westbourne Bridge, a road that previously carried traffic from Harrow Road to Bishops Bridge Road but was blocked at the north end and appropriated for the Westway scheme.

Continuing westward, Westway runs parallel with the Great Western Main Line railway for about 1/2 mile before turning south-west at Westbourne Park and crossing the railway to run immediately adjacent to London Underground’s Hammersmith & City line for 3/4 mile as far as Ladbroke Grove station, after which it returns to a more east-west alignment for the 1/2 mile to the elevated roundabout junction with the West Cross Route (A3220) and flyover that takes vehicles high above the roundabout and Wood Lane (A219) to return to ground level and connect to the end of Western Avenue.

Due to the huge construction costs and widespread public opposition, most of the London Ringway scheme was cancelled in 1973 and the Westway, the West Cross Route and East Cross Route in east London were the only significant parts to be built.

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