West Cross Route

Route description

This description begins at the southern end of the route and travels north.

Clapham to West Kensington

Continuing from the South Cross Route, Ringway 1 would have interchanged with the Clapham-Wandsworth Link in the vicinity of Latchmere Road, threading the sliproads of a triangular three-way motorway interchange under and around the complex tangle of railway tracks, emerging from an underpass below the Victoria and Waterloo lines to run along the north side of the West London Line railway.

Crossing the Thames on a new bridge, there would have been a large free-flowing interchange with the "Chelsea Embankment Connection", a spur motorway linking to the Chelsea Embankment itself. The embankment and the road onwards all the way to Westminster were supposed to be turned into a riverside dual carriageway - indeed parts of it were, and still are today - and hazy plans existed at the time to build a futuristic new tunnel bypassing the Houses of Parliament so the road could flow directly into the Victoria Embankment towards the City.

The complex interchange at Chelsea would have been adjacent to the former Lots Road Power Station and was to be almost entirely elevated above ground level. Its looping sliproads would permit full access between Ringway 1 and the Embankment spur, and access to and from the north for another spur linking to Townmead Road. A vastly upgraded Townm Road would have formed a free-flowing dual carriageway route on to Wandsworth Bridge.

Continuing north from the Chelsea Interchange, the motorway would have run on a viaduct directly above the railway line, rising up even higher at certain points to clear existing road bridges across the tracks. A short double-bend would take the motorway directly behind what was then Earl's Court Exhibition Centre. In 1991 an extension to the building, Earl's Court Two, was built spanning the railway and blocking any chance of building the motorway or anything like it, and in recent years Earl's Court itself has been replaced with a new high-rise housing development.

Still running directly on top of the railway, the motorway would then reach an interchange with the A4 at West Kensington. Two different designs were proposed here. Early designs show a three-level stacked roundabout, with several alternatives drawn up. One concept was an enormous saddle-shaped roundabout draped across the motorway, while another had a smaller, diamond shaped roundabout. Later designs showed a free-flowing interchange that would serve only the A4 to the west, with no access to or from Central London.

West Kensington to Harlesden

North of the A4, the road would have continued along the West London Line, with the carriageways splitting apart to run either side of Olympia station. This odd arrangement, with the West London Line in the middle of the elevated motorway, would then continue almost until Holland Park Roundabout. Initial proposals for an underpass here were rejected because of the steepness of the resulting slope between the underpass and elevated viaduct. A flyover was proposed there instead. Sliproads to and from the south would connect with Holland Road before joining the roundabout.

The large diamond-shaped Holland Park Roundabout was actually built, ready to receive its flyover, and from that point northwards to the A40 the West Cross Route was actually built, opening in 1970 with the number M41.

The roundabout is surrounded by low concrete walls which, in some places, do not quite match the current layout of the road, giving away the original intention for the junction. At the south-west corner of the junction, one drifts oddly away from the road towards the railway, following what was supposed to be the edge of the northbound off-slip from the motorway as it joined the roundabout. It then actually strikes out over the railway line, a strange stub of elevated road that now carries only grass and a concrete wall to stop urban explorers dropping onto the tracks below.

The extant part of the motorway was designed at an earlier stage than the rest of the West Cross Route and was built to a less ambitious standard, with three lanes and a hard shoulder in each direction, a standard that seemed adequate when it was planned in the very early 1960s, but which would have been narrower than the sections to the north and south if they had been completed. It might well have been widened if the rest of the route had been built.

In the late 1990s the short section of road lost its motorway status and was extensively reconstructed, and it is now a dual two-lane road without hard shoulders. A new intermediate junction has been built, with its sliproads entirely constructed within the original width of the road. The best guide to its original width is immediately north of the Holland Park Roundabout where there is an awful lot of spare tarmac and white paint.

At the northern end of this short section, the motorway would pass underneath the A40(M) Westway (now simply A40) just west of the elevated roundabout. The twisting, elevated structures that now carry the West Cross Route up to the roundabout were supposed to be sliproads leading off either side of the motorway.

North of the Westway, the West Cross Route would have swept across yet more of North Kensington, following the east side of the railway. The terraces of Victorian houses actually have stubs of sliproads pointing menacingly at them from the Westway roundabout, a concrete statement of intent that was never fulfilled. Most of the northern half of Latimer Road, already sliced in two by the Westway, would have disappeared.

On reaching Willesden Junction, a windswept complex of railway tracks and sidings amid scrubland and low-rent industrial land, a large and complicated free-flowing interchange would have completed the circuit around Central London by connecting the motorway to the North Cross Route. Access would also be provided west towards the A40 and north to the A404 Harrow Road.

Full circle

The motorway route described above, forming the western side of Ringway 1, would have been far more important than the shorter motorway route it would cross at White City, the A40(M) Westway. Oddly, the earliest ancestor of the West Cross Route was as a short spur to the Westway, in which role it would have been much less important than its parent.

The West Cross Route, as built, remains an outstanding example of why building one isolated fragment of a motorway project is rarely a good idea. The West Cross Route today dumps all its traffic onto the urban roads of Shepherd's Bush and Kensington, and since 1970 has been failing to make a convincing job of relieving any urban streets of heavy traffic at all.

That's not to say the whole West Cross Route would have been a folly - an extension of the motorway as far as the A4 would have been genuinely useful and meant that highly unsuitable residential streets would not be used as a de facto dual carriageway around West London, as they are now - but the plug was pulled in the very widespread shock and disgust surrounding the completed Westway, and the one tiny section that now exists could never hope to do much on its own.

Half a motorway

The consulting engineers Husband and Co. produced reports on the design and construction of the West Cross Route in 1962 and 1964, but a major revision of the plans was carried out in 1970, at which time the proposal became quite different.

In the mid-1960s a dual three-lane motorway was proposed, and that's the standard the short extant section was originally built to, but dual four-lanes with hard shoulders on both sides were thought to be the ultimate requirement. Concerned that the traffic situation west of Central London was particularly bad, the GLC intended the West Cross Route to begin construction as early as possible, but if it preceded all the other motorways it would eventually connect to, a design was needed that would work as an interim stage.

The resulting plans are astonishing. The engineers drew up designs for half a motorway: two lanes and a hard shoulder each way on an elevated structure that would ultimately form half of the total width. In its smaller guise, the road would be quicker and cheaper to build and could begin providing relief to Kensington and Chelsea much sooner, and being designed to have the other half bolted on later meant that doubling its width would be no problem.

The new 1970 designs also included revised layouts for the junctions at the A4 and the Chelsea Basin. A free-flowing junction with no access to or from Central London was devised for the A4, while the Chelsea Basin's new layout allowed it to form a temporary terminus for the motorway until it could be extended south over the Thames to the South Cross Route.

The GLC began the legal and administrative processes to start construction on the West Cross Route, and in 1970 it expected that Phase I works would begin on site in 1972. The GLDP Inquiry caused the start of work to be postponed, much to the GLC's irritation, until 1973 local elections when the incoming Labour administration cancelled it and every other motorway plan.

Back from the dead

After the Ringway plan was cancelled, the idea of the West Cross Route refused to disappear with the other motorway plans. Traffic in Kensington continued to be appalling - it still is - and the Earl's Court one-way system continued to be a major problem for traffic flow and residents alike.

Something like the West Cross Route, on a smaller scale to serve the role of bypassing the local streets without it being part of a wider motorway network, seems to have stayed in the back of planners' minds for a long time after the motorway was called off. For example, at the time the M1 was extended south to its current terminus at the North Circular Road in 1979, space was left for the southward continuation of the motorway, long after London's motorway plans were dead. It seems to have been done to allow for the very distant hope that an extension could be built along the proposed line of Ringway 1 to meet the West Cross Route.

In 1986 the GLC was disbanded, and responsibility for the major roads it had managed passed to the Department of Transport who maintained them as trunk roads. A pro-motoring Conservative Government took over London's roads from a decidedly left-wing Council and immediately started looking at ways to ease traffic flow. A study was commissioned, carried out by civil engineers Halcrow, to recommend ways to resolve the serious problems in west and south-west London.

In 1988, the DTp accepted Halcrow's recommendations and published plans for one of the new roads they had proposed, the Western Environmental Improvement Route or WEIR. It was the West Cross Route, exhumed and presented in smaller form, and indeed the original engineers, Husband and Co., were involved in the design once again.

A partly grade-separated dual carriageway would have run alongside the railway from Holland Park Roundabout to Chelsea Basin, forking into two single-carriageway branches at its southern end to split cross-river traffic between Battersea and Wandsworth Bridges.

A consultation was carried out among the residents of Kensington and Earl's Court, but the promises of a traffic-free Earl's Court and a pedestrianised North End Road didn't seem to find favour. Within a year or two the Government had backed down and the West Cross Route finally vanished down the plughole never to be seen again. The space does not now exist for such a road to be built.