Monday 12th July 1943

Plans were unveiled for London that included a ring road around the city. The London County Council tasked JH Forshaw, its resident architect, and Patrick Abercrombie with drawing up a comprehensive plan for the old County of London. The authors saw London’s four “major defects” as traffic congestion, depressed housing, inadequacy and maldistribution of open spaces, and the jumble of houses and industry (“indeterminate zoning”). The first of these is of greatest interest here, but it should be noted that the plan was equally visionary in all four areas, proposing the creation of new parkland from slum clearance and extensive re-zoning of land uses. The road plan they created had three classifications of road:
Arterial Roads, without any frontages or access to side streets, and with parallel service roads;
Sub-Arterial Roads, main roads in the built-up area, with frontage development permitted, but with service roads provided wherever possible and side streets blocked off;
and Local Roads, which covered everything else.
All through traffic would be directed onto a network of arterial roads, and it would generally not be possible to travel long distances by local roads, as they would be effectively blocked off from through traffic. Areas within the grid would be as self-contained as possible, to reduce the demand for travel. For the first time, the plan hinged on a system of ring roads – most importantly the “B-Ring”.