The waters of the Fleet (Line) became considerably murkier in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. To recap, Fleet Line Stage 1 costs to Charing Cross had risen from an estimate of £35m in 1971 to £90m upon completion, an almost threefold rise in costs, but this was in line with the high cost of living inflation during the decade.
There was no reason at the time to believe the rampant inflation would abate in the 1980s, so any cost estimate was viewed through this lens. At outturn prices this was just under £15m per single track mile, with 7 deep-level platforms, and station reconstruction and enlargement at Bond Street, Green Park and Strand/Trafalgar Square (the latter two were combined to become Charing Cross tube station).Summary of the case for the Fleet / Jubilee Line
As we covered in Part 1 of this series, one of the reasons the Fleet Line was originally planned via the City to Lewisham in the 1960s was to alleviate the severe over-crowding on peak hour BR Southern Region (SR) trains from south-east London into the central area, which was expected to worsen with continued population growth. By providing an attractive alternative route to central London, the Fleet Line would syphon off passengers at New Cross and Lewisham, releasing capacity on SR trains into London Bridge, Charing Cross, and Cannon Street. Completion of the Fleet/Jubilee Tube to Charing Cross in 1979, however, came after a 13% decline in SR peak passengers between 1967 and 1977, as well as a decline in the number of the “economically active population living in south London”. The consequence during the 1970s was that any tube extension beyond Charing Cross became increasingly dependent on whatever case could be leveraged by Docklands developments.Jubilee Tube Alternative Proposals – express and dead tunnels
Due to the inflationary and national budget pressures of the 1970s that were forestalling progress of Stage 2, in 1974 London Transport (LT) came up with an alternative proposal to build the Stage 2 Tube tunnels bereft of rails and stations from Aldwych to Fenchurch Street for about £10m. As fitting out stations was (and still is) the most expensive part of Tube line construction, they would have been added later when affordable, but at least this would safeguard the route underground. The proposal, however, was not approved. Two years later, in 1976, LT Director of Transportation Policy (later Chief Secretary) Paul Garbutt noted that the Fleet Stage 2 safeguarding situation was becoming urgent, but by that time LT no longer favoured building dead tunnels all the way across the City from Charing Cross. In fact the Fleet tunnels had been constructed approximately 950m eastwards of Charing Cross station almost to Aldwych as part of Stage 1. Instead, LT proposed tunnels only be constructed from east of Cannon Street to Fenchurch Street, where the greatest risks arose from deep foundations for new office towers. The then-vacant site on Royal Mint Street east of Fenchurch Street would be the works site, with construction proceeding westward. This proposal did not find favour either. The GLC started proposing many Jubilee line alternatives in the second half of the 1970s to try to find some way to start construction of Jubilee Stage 2 that was acceptable to the Government, DTp and Treasury. Shovels in the ground were seen staking a claim on the land (or under it). The other major consideration was the period’s high inflation, which threatened to run the costs out of contention. It was well understood that a pound spent on construction now could save a pound and a half a few years later.GLC Policies and Funding for Jubilee Stage 2 and 3
In 1976 the GLC intended its (Money) Bill, by way of the Transport Policies and Programmes bid (TPP – a formal investment plan and bidding document for Government funding through Transport Supplementary Grant), to include £10m for the start of Jubilee Stage 2 works, and £6m for a single bore Woolwich tunnel for a passenger service from Stratford, to be used later as one bore of a future Jubilee line. The Labour Secretary of State at the Department of the Environment noted:Although nationally it should not be a matter for Government concern if GLC went ahead and paid for extension of the [Jubilee] Line out of their rates, it was not an issue from which the Government could be dissociated. Whatever the source of finance, it would become part of the Government’s public expenditure programme and, if it were built, offsetting savings which would have to be sought from other parts of the Department’s national programme for transport expenditure. It would be difficult to allow the powers in the LT Bill to be granted and expect to control the expenditure solely through the GLC’s annual Money Bill.Nonetheless, anxious to get the next Fleet/Jubilee extension started, the GLC funded LT to conduct surveys, site investigation and planning for the desired Jubilee extension to Wapping, Milwall, Custom House, Woolwich and Thamesmead. These were carried out between 1976 and 1978 in anticipation of applying for Parliamentary powers for Stages 3 and 4 in 1979 and 1980 respectively.
Authorising the Jubilee Stage 3 powers to keep Stage 2 alive
The GLC was pushing hard for Stage 3 to support Docklands regeneration and to keep Stage 2 alive, as the Jubilee’s second stage added little on its own to London’s transport issues. According to the Labour Government:London Transport and the Greater London Council agree that an underground extension from Charing Cross to Fenchurch Street only would give a very poor return on the related investment.Stage 2 therefore required authorisation of Stage 3 for its continued existence – Stages 2 and 3 were a package deal.
Jubilee Line Stub to Cannon Street
The Docklands redevelopment vision and plan were stated in the published London Docklands Strategic Plan (LDSP) of 1976 as a fairly unexciting mish-mash of individual borough ideas, without much high-density development that might have helped to underpin a Tube business case. Marriage of transport and major land use changes can still struggle at times in the 2010s; the 1970s was certainly not the decade to see joined-up thinking put into practice – although the early Woolwich Tunnel was an interesting example of such thinking to try to stimulate Docklands development. Another option discussed in 1978 was to build the Jubilee only as far as Cannon Street where it would terminate at a new interchange with the District Line, which was planned in the full Jubilee Stage 2 build. However the cost savings of this truncated Jubilee line were insufficient to compensate for much reduced passenger demand that would result.
1979 Map of Docklands Transport Spine options, from the Parliamentary Bill
Docklands Jubilee alignment proposals
Consideration was also given to a northern Jubilee Stage 3 routeing on the surface through the Docklands, which might be considerably cheaper than the all-tunnel southern route. However the conclusion was that an all-tunnelled southern route via Wapping, Surrey Docks, Millwall, North Greenwich and Custom House would provide the best ridership, which was confirmed by public opinion at consultations. Not all of this route would have been tunnelled – certainly not through the Royal Docks area, and possibly not all the way to Thamesmead (for example, in one option part of the BR Custom House-North Woolwich line might have been used, just as Crossrail is using it now). The London Transport Executive separately proposed to Parliament in 1977-78 to re-align the Fleet / Jubilee Line Stage 3 between Fenchurch Street and Surrey Docks stations to allow for a station at St Katharine Docks. Another detailed GLC option proposed in 1978 was for a longer ‘express’ Jubilee Line extension to open in phases, as funding became available, to safeguard the full Jubilee Line route including Stage 4 to Thamesmead. The objective was to create a visible transport infrastructure to attract development, jobs and housing to the Docklands. This proposal consisted of three segments:- From the existing Stage 1 Jubilee tunnels near Aldwych to Surrey Docks, omitting stations at Aldwych, Ludgate Circus and St Katharine’s Dock, and a simpler station at Cannon Street excluding subterranean interchange with the Northern and Central Lines), for £107m. The Wapping and Surrey Docks areas were deemed to have office and service industry development potential and a large housing development.
- Surrey Docks to Millwall in the Isle of Dogs, Custom House and Beckton, with no station at Greenwich North, plus a link to the proposed Woolwich Tunnel and the North London Line (NLL), estimated at £62m. This was to encourage development at the Isle of Dogs, Royal Docks and Beckton.
- The third and final segment would be Custom House to Thamesmead for £75m. The central London infill stations could be built later for an estimated £36m, and the further Docklands stations for £4-5m each.
The memo went on to re-state the GLC thinking that Surrey Docks and Wapping were the most favoured areas for developing new job opportunities in offices, commerce and service industries, which was the 1970s Docklands development context. Notwithstanding the considerable effort undertaken for this proposal, the Government remained unconvinced. The GLC in September 1978 noted that the Parliamentary bill for the first half of Stage 3, from Fenchurch Street to Woolwich Arsenal would be presented in the 1979 Parliamentary session, which if unopposed would become law in August of that year. This Bill was drafted such that construction would proceed in sections to allow for the Woolwich tunnel under the Thames to be built ahead of other sections and to allow the BR-served NLL cross-river line to proceed – see the discussion below. The GLC also noted that a Bill for the second half of Stage 3 was being prepared for submission to Parliament in 1979, ideally for enactment in August 1980. High inflation in the 1970s means that it is hard to make a simple value comparison between different schemes at different dates, or even similar schemes at different dates. To attempt to rationalise this, we propose a simple comparative cost measure– the cost per single track mile, in the following table of the Fleet / Jubilee extension variations proposed.
- it may well be feasible to extend the [Jubilee] Line to Surrey Docks and perhaps Millwall in the Isle of Dogs without the need for a depot and maintenance facilities at the eastern end, but there would be higher associated operating costs;
- costs of an extension from Charing Cross to Surrey Docks would be about £90/95m and to Millwall about £110m if stations at Aldwych, Ludgate Circus and St Katherine’s Dock were dropped; [This presumably excluded an eastern depot, as Charing Cross-Surrey Docks was £107m in the original GLC estimate]
- an extension into Docklands from Fenchurch Street only is almost certainly not worth further consideration. It would not provide adequate service or operational links with the rest of the Underground. [Not stated was that a line starting eastwards from Fenchurch Street would need a depot in its own right if it did not link up with another line.]
| Date | Sponsor | Line | Main Routeing | Cost £m | £m/stm | GLC | Govt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1974 | LT | Tube tunnels only | Aldwych – Fenchurch Street | 10 | 2.4 | Lab | Lab |
| 1976 | LT/GLC | Tube tunnels only | Cannon Street – Fenchurch Street | Unknown | Unknown | Lab | Lab |
| 1978 | LT/DTp | Jubilee Stage 2-3 Express | Aldwych (no station) – Fenchurch Street – Wapping – Surrey Docks | 107* | 14.3 | Con | Lab |
| Jubilee Stage 3 Express | Surrey Docks – Millwall – Custom House – Beckton | 62* | 6.1 | Con | Lab | ||
| Jubilee Stage 4 Express | Custom House – Thamesmead | 75* | 7.9 | Con | Lab | ||
| Jan 1979 | GLC/LTE | Tube tunnels only | Aldwych (no station) – Fenchurch Street | 70* | 16.7 | Con | Lab |
| Full build | Aldwych – Ludgate Circus – Cannon Street – Fenchurch Street | 103* | 24.6 | Con | Lab | ||
| 1979 | LT/GLC | Aldwych (no station) – Fenchurch Street – Wapping – Surrey Docks (implied no depot) | 95 | 12.7 | Con | Con | |
| Aldwych (no station) – Fenchurch Street – Wapping – Surrey Docks – Millwall | 110 | 11 | Con | Con | |||
| 1980 Study of Lower Cost Alternatives to the Jubilee Line in Docklands | Jubilee Stage 2-3 Express | Aldwych (no station) – simple Cannon Street – Fenchurch Street – Wapping – Surrey Docks – Millwall – Custom House -Beckton | 200 | 11.3 | Con | Con | |
Table 1: Fleet / Jubilee extension options 1974-1980 (*These project estimates include rolling stock.)
Since 1977 the GLC was held by the Conservatives, led by Horace Cutler. The Minister of Transport from 1976 to May 1979 was Labour’s Bill Rodgers. Norman Fowler replaced him as the Conservative Minister of Transport upon the change in Government. The post was re-graded in January 1981 to control of a full Department separated from Environment, with a Secretary of State status, although Fowler only lasted in the position until September 1981. More about the politicians in Part 3, but it is worth noting in advance here that the 1980s’ segregation of Transport from Environment at Government level was on the face of it unlikely to assist the case for a railway extension intended to support new land uses. In reality, and with hindsight, the separation did help – because of the personalities on the Environment side and new political initiatives for Docklands, not because of the Jubilee Line project nor the initial DTp stance.BR Woolwich Line as Jubilee Docklands pilot route
In conjunction with the Jubilee ‘express’ Tube proposals, in 1978 the GLC also put forth the idea of boring a single 1½ mile long main-line gauge tunnel under the Thames betwixt Woolwich Arsenal and Silvertown for a new British Rail (BR) service from Stratford and Custom House to Woolwich Arsenal, and possibly onwards to the North Kent Line, for eventual takeover by the Jubilee line on its way to Thamesmead. A Joint Working Party consisting of BR, LT and the GLC was formed in 1978 to investigate and evaluate the alignments, gauges and costs. It found that a 5 metre diameter tunnel suitable for BR rolling stock, 4km (2½ miles) from east of Custom House (not Silvertown) to Woolwich Arsenal, would cost £23m. Electrifying the line and the connecting BR track works were estimated at £5m, which would allow a direct rail connection between Stratford, West Ham and Docklands cross-river to Woolwich, with new rail interchanges at West Ham and Woolwich. The alignment would approximately parallel the North London Line’s (NLL) Connaught Tunnel, but pass deep under the surrounding docks and the Thames.
Docklands Rail Improvements schemes, from the 1978 LT Annual Report
Other Stage 2 safeguarding
Safeguarding Fleet Stage 2 was becoming expensive (£5m to September 1977, equivalent to a third of a mile of tube not built!) as the London Transport Executive (LTE) had to compensate land owners considerably not to use, build or develop their basement levels. However this was not considered to be cost-effective as it was not always respected – the City Corporation of London had ignored LTE’s safeguarding request and granted planning permission for an office block at 86-108 Cannon Street with foundations in the Fleet Line alignment. The Parliamentary safeguarding was supposed to prevent this. Perhaps the ambivalence to authorise Stage 2 led to confusion and a lack of will to mount much of a defence of the safeguarding of the alignment, which the City took advantage of. But safeguarding was effective in the case of Bush Lane House nearby at 80 Cannon Street, which was designed with a unique cantilevered foundation structure so that the Fleet Line tunnels, which were planned to pass directly beneath the building, could be constructed at a later date. The foundation work for this eight storey office building was estimated to cost £1.25m. This building has since been renamed and the unused railway area beneath the building has been renovated into restaurant/retail and office facilities as a glass box slipped beneath the original building. At the same time there was a desire to safeguard a passageway between the Jubilee Line escalator and the Cannon Street District Line platforms before Stage 2 was funded. This passageway would have traversed the basement of Lloyd’s Bank Computer Centre at 78 Cannon Street, once the Centre was to move out in mid-1979. A January 1979 GLC/LTE £103m proposal provided a more detailed breakdown than usual, with £50m for tunnelling, construction and tracks, £30m for finishes and equipment, and £10m for land. The remaining £13m was for additional rolling stock, ideally to be ordered as a follow on option to the Stage 1 train order should Stage 2 be approved forthwith. Also in January 1979 (by which time it was the Jubilee Line) the GLC – who were LT’s policy and funding master – proposed another Stage 2 plan to omit Aldwych and Ludgate Circus stations and to build a simpler Cannon Street station, for approximately £70m. By doing so it hoped to make the Stage 3 Jubilee extension to the Docklands more attractive for government funding. The further implication was that it was not vital to serve Aldwych and Ludgate Circus by a Tube line, so this proposal in turn put greater reliance on the development and regeneration merits found within Docklands.Parliamentary process
The LT Act 1977 renewed the land powers for the Fleet/Jubilee Line Stage 3 from Fenchurch Street to New Cross for 5 years. The following table lists this and the other Fleet and Jubilee Line enabling Acts, with their funding status.| Date | Powers | Stage | Main Routing | Funded? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1969 | Parliamentary | 1 | Baker Street to Charing Cross and overrun tunnels to near Aldwych | Yes |
| 1971-76 | Parliamentary | 2 | Aldwych and Cannon Street to Fenchurch Street | No |
| 1977- 31 Dec 82 | Parliamentary | |||
| 1977-31 Dec 82 | Land | |||
| 1978 | Parliamentary | 3 | Fenchurch Street to Woolwich Arsenal, with a branch to Beckton Powers to safeguard the route alignment were sought in the LT Bill | No |
| 1979 | Alignment Safeguarding | |||
| 1978-31 Dec 83 | Land |
Table 2: London Transport Fleet/Jubilee Railway Bills
The key of course was funding, which wasn’t forthcoming. The London Transport Bill proposed to Parliament in early 1979 before the May election included authorisation for Stage 3 of the Jubilee Line, from Fenchurch Street by way of Custom House and the Docklands under the Thames to Woolwich Arsenal, with a branch to Beckton. For Stage 2 of the Jubilee line, 24tph were planned from Charing Cross to Fenchurch Street, and 16tph east of there for the subsequent stages. The am peak hourly ridership per segment per direction was projected to be:| Charing Cross – Aldwych | 6,000 |
|---|---|
| Cannon Street – Fenchurch Street | 11,000 |
| Surrey Docks – Millwall | 9,500 |
| Woolwich – Thamesmead | 3,000 |
Jubilee Line Stages 3 and 4 Projected Benefits
The GLC case and the 1979 Parliamentary Bill cited the following benefits for fully extending the Jubilee Line to Thamesmead:- Significantly improve cross-Thames mobility
- Provide fast direct access to central London
- Provide fast convenient transport within the Docklands
- Relief of BR North Kent line
- Relief of London Bridge BR services
- Enable thousands of much needed housing units to be built in the Docklands
- Help contain the growth of car traffic in the area
- Reduce dependence on oil supplies (a key concern in the 1970s)
- Serve the remote Thamesmead area (as the planned local employment there quickly evaporated).
GLC accumulates its own Jubilee Stage 2 funding
Given the government funding roadblock, Cutler and the GLC over the late 1970’s had started accumulating funds to start construction of Jubilee Stage 2, amounting to £100m by 1979. As noted in ‘London’s Underground’ by John Glover:denied a capital grant from the (Labour) Government to continue east from Charing Cross, the (Conservative) leader of the GLC said that ‘the line would be built whether the government agrees and helps or not… If we cannot borrow the money we will raise it from the rates and damn the government.Cutler’s full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes pronouncement, made at the GLC meeting on 13 February 1979, was a surprise to the GLC as well as to LT. But it was not supported by or indicated in any GLC budget or cost estimates. Cutler’s puff about the GLC doing it itself were mere words. To understand why construction of Stage 2 did not proceed, it is necessary to follow the money, politics and the process. The Greater London Council’s (GLC) plan was to fund construction through its ‘Money’ Bill (that funded its operations and obligations), but national governments of both persuasions had refused to fund Jubilee construction by restricting the amount of the Transport Supplementary Grant provided to the GLC. A government memo before the May 1979 election noted:
If the LT Bill were to go through unopposed or were to be opposed unsuccessfully, the Government would still be able to control the start of construction of Stages two and three of the Jubilee Line by taking actions against the GLC (Money) Bill in 1979 and subsequently. The Schedule to those Bills list the capital sums allocated under various Acts including the Transport (London) Act 1969; a reduction or deletion of the total under this head would directly reduce the total which the GLC was authorised to spend on capital grants to the London Transport Executive and the British Railways Board, which would, of course, include capital sums for the Jubilee Line works.The Labour Secretary of State for the Environment, Peter Shore, wrote on 7 February 1979 to Sir Peter Baldwin (Transport Permanent Secretary) and Peter Lazarus (Deputy Secretary, Transport Industries and International Policies) to state his support for the Jubilee Stage 3 powers Act, but authorised no funding for construction. Shore stated his position thus:
I remain firmly of the view that the priority transport projects for Docklands are the road projects (including some in your trunk road programme) and rail improvements which you and I put forward in July 1977. But we did not of course rule out that at some stage developments of the Tube system could be helpful.
Roads it is
There was a Labour government from 1974, led by Jim Callaghan from 1976 after Harold Wilson resigned. A Conservative-led GLC from 1977 was not necessarily going to see eye to eye with a different-colour national government. However the biggest obstacle to making progress with the Fleet / Jubilee Line extensions was the state of the national finances, rather than party differences about different city transport options (where Labour and Conservatives quite often had similar views on tube schemes). At that point the Labour government turned down the GLC Jubilee Stage 2 extension proposal, even though the Conservative GLC was well on its way to accumulate all of the funding for it. The 1974-1979 Labour Government’s preferred Docklands strategy was to invigorate and regenerate the industrial sector of the Docklands. This was also the GLC’s published position, so the Government had a pre-prepared policy to use as a baseline. However the Government believed that the Jubilee line would not support this goal, and that the Tube line was more likely to attract residents to the Docklands to funnel workers into central London to work than to support and grow existing Docklands industries and jobs. London Transport pointed out that Jubilee line Stages 2 and 3 would be considerably less expensive (£325m) than building roads to serve the Docklands (£450m-£500m), and that the opportunity of building mass transit before major regeneration took place would lessen reliance on cars, especially in the era of energy crises and high petrol prices. As well, the Jubilee line spine linking north and south banks of the Thames would be key infrastructure connections making the Docklands as easy to access as any other part of London. The late 1970s’ Labour Government aspired for completion of the national Trunk Road Programme, to which they planned to add the (still unbuilt) East London River Crossing, “to complete Docklands’ links with the adjoining parts of the regional and national road system”. Further to this, the Labour Government had set the completion of the M25 motorway as their top priority, under the rationale that it would expedite the flow of goods and freight, and direct through-London traffic around the most congested parts of the city. It is important to note the Ringways roads were still in the official plans in the 1970s, and that the M25 London orbital motorway had just started construction in 1975, so government thinking was still very much based on the car for non-central London transport.The Department strikes back
The Transport department (DTp) analysed the late 1970s’ GLC projections and rationale, and estimated the travel benefits from reduced transfers and direct travel to be £15m per annum, a return of 4-5%, when 10% was required by the Government to justify projects at the time because of the poor state of national finances. DTp did not include any benefits from reduced road congestion as they believed this would be negligible. Which is ironic given the Government’s plan for, and reliance on, £1bn of roads for the Docklands. The full Jubilee line was estimated to provide only an additional £2.5m in revenues per annum due to many passengers switching from bus services, and cause a £4m reduction in BR revenue. To reach the required £25m return on a £250m investment would necessitate an additional charge per passenger mile of 50p, 10 times the contemporary figure of 5-6p. Thus the DTp determined that the Jubilee line extension was not financially viable. The DTp also noted the GLC’s argument for the Jubilee extension was based more on increasing mobility and therefore employment in the Docklands than on a financial basis. However the DTp also noted that the GLC’s own estimate was that 80% of Jubilee line passengers would be travelling to and from central London, with only 20% for local travel. So the GLC’s planning basis for Docklands development did not sit happily alongside the required business case for the Jubilee extension. To verify their assessment on the viability of the Jubilee line, the DTp compared the numbers against contemporaneous UK urban rail schemes:- Merseyrail heavy rail loop under central Liverpool was estimated to have a return above 10%.
- The Tyne & Wear Metro’s initial estimated return of 11% was determined in reality to be between 2.5%-4% due to higher capital costs and lower benefits.
- Even Manchester’s Piccadilly to Victoria mainline stations (Pic-Vic) Tunnel, estimated at £100m, was only projected to have a return of 8.5% rather than 10%, so had not been approved.
Development effects of the Victoria line extrapolated to the Fleet Line
The final stake in the coffin for the DTp regarding the GLC’s Docklands development argument was that there was little or no evidence of “significant development benefits to Walthamstow and Brixton” as a result of the Victoria line opening in 1971. Conveniently omitted by the DTp was the fact that these two stations were long established residential neighbourhoods, whereas the Docklands was overwhelmingly an industrial and post-industrial area ripe for redevelopment and was in the process of being officially earmarked for regeneration (albeit with low densities as previously discussed). The South East London Land Use Study of 1973 had evaluated development effects of the newly opened Victoria line (which were very little) and used them to project the development effects of the planned Fleet Line. This study had also predicted not much office development for the first 10 years of the full Fleet Line to the Docklands. Not surprising given the highest inflation in living memory, nor any large-scale local development prioritisation for that type of land use. Regarding the GLC’s employment forecasts performed in 1978, the DTp calculated that each new Docklands job would cost £44,000, when the average late 1970s’ salary was only around £5,000. They also noted that most of these jobs would merely be resited from other London locations. Capitalised transport benefits of the full Jubilee line were calculated to net less than £9m, leaving approximately £17m to fund. On 31 January 1979 Joel Barnett, Chief Secretary to the Treasury responsible for public sector finances, had written to Bill Rodgers, the Labour Transport Minister, to provide the Treasury’s views on the Jubilee Stage 3 to the Docklands. He had said:You will not be surprised to hear that I consider that we should do all we can to prevent the GLC from committing resources to these projects. Neither project is justified in transport terms and the wider economic benefits are small and uncertain… I know you also realise the danger of setting an undesirable precedent for other parts of the country.But despite all of the options that the GLC presented, what else could they have done to build a case for the Jubilee tube extension at this stage? With the new Conservative Government of May 1979 there was now a potential alignment with the Conservative-held GLC’s views on transport which could possibly change the landscape. This we will explore in Part 3. Missed Part 1 of this series? Then read Diving into the Fleet: London’s Lost Tube now. Part 3 – Jubilee line: Getting Conservative 1980-85 Part 4 – The rest of the Eighties Part 5 – Th Canary Wharf years
A very interesting posting as I am ignorant of the (long) history of this project although we have our own examples down under. Look forward to the next part.
“The Minister of Transport from 1976 to May 1979 was Labour’s Bill Rodgers. Norman Fowler replaced him as the Conservative Minister of Transport upon the change in Government. The post was re-graded in January 1981 to control of a full Department separated from Environment, with a Secretary of State status, although Fowler only lasted in the position until September 1981.”
Actually a bit more complicated than that. Bill Rodgers was made a full Secretary of State for Transport in 1976 and the DTp separated from the DoE at that time. This was said to be a way of rewarding Bill by Jim Callaghan. After the 1979 general election, transport retained its separate departmental status but Norman Fowler was not Secretary of State (as Margaret Thatcher had run out of cabinet places). He did, though, attend cabinet meetings. He was promoted to full cabinet status in 1981.
“It is important to note the Ringways roads were still in the official plans in the 1970s”
The ringways had been abandoned in 1973 as a result of public pressure, but the Heath Government had opposed them as unaffordable before then and the GLC (which was supportive until then) had slowly whittled down the plans to try and make them acceptable in a very similar way to the way it wriggled around trying to find an acceptable Fleet/Jubilee line extension. The GLC did, though, actively promote roads in Docklands as well as rail lines and built the Docklands Northern Relief Road linking The Highway in Limehouse to Canning Town. It had a parallel scheme, the Docklands Southern Relief Road, which would have involved the demolition of Greenwich town centre and the destruction of Greenwich Park, which did not go ahead after the details were leaked to the media. Sir Horace Cutler, then leader of the GLC said he would put the leaker’s ‘head on a pole outside County Hall’, though it’s not recorded that this ever happened.
@quinlet – the split between Environment and Transport was understood to be driven by the Treasury, who disliked intensely the combined budget of a unified department , as it allowed Ministers to internalise the trade offs between the transport and environment spending heads at budget negotiation time.
single main-line gauge tunnel 1½ miles under the Thames
Sounds quite deep! I suspect you mean a 1½-mile-long single main-line gauge tunnel under the Thames.
[Oooh you Überpedant. I have changed it. PoP]
The anti-rail pro-road bias of the times is very striking, seen from this distance in time.
I note also that poor old Thamesmead got left out ( again, again, again, still … )
@Greg: I remember seeing ads on the tube back in ’98/’99 extolling the virtues of Thamesmead. “Where London comes to life…” I seem to recall was the tagline…. 😉
@Jonathan Roberts/Long Branch Mike
Thanks for part 2 of this History of the JLE, all very well researched.
I had to say that I hadn’t noticed before that Homerton only opened in 1985, Hackney Wick in 1980 and Hackney Central re-opened in 1980 as well as Dalston Kingsland in 1983.
I still find it shocking to look back at the lack of vision that people had at the time for Docklands!
Still, you have to feel sorry for St Katherine’s Dock, don’t you? Never was a place in Central London so bypassed in terms of transport. I don’t think that the JLE’s four river crossings are a much better plan, but there is such a huge gap between Tower Hill station and Wapping station, don’t you think?
@Briantist – Having worked at S Katherine’s Dock for the best part of 9 months, I can’t say I understand your comments about its isolation. From Waterloo, neither better nor worse than many other CAZ locations. About 7 minutes walk from Tower Hill or for a more comfortable ride, the bus along to the southern bridgefoot of Tower Bridge, then a short walk over that bridge – what’s not to like? Decent bookshop (at the time) in the eastern half of Eastcheap, 12 minutes from Leadenhall Market etc etc. Tourists a bit of a pain, of course.
@Briantist – I worked at St Katharine Docks for a number of years and it was only a 10 minute walk from Tower Hill so hardly isolated. A very pretty walk it was too beside the docks with views of the Tower of London, Tower Bridge and the City (but also the very un-lovely Guoman Hotel).
I always got a seat on the west bound District line trains home as well before they filled up in the city.
Nice article…in your research for it, did you come across any proposed station platform designs for any of the extensions (particularly Stage 2)? I’m intrigued to see if they were similar to what was built for Stage 1 at CX/Green Park/Bond St/Baker St.
@Quinlet:
‘It had a parallel scheme, the Docklands Southern Relief Road, which would have involved the demolition of Greenwich town centre and the destruction of Greenwich Park…’
Jeezus, imagine that!!!! And I thought the Ringways plan was controversial enough! What is your source for details of this barmy scheme?
@Anonymously
No station or platform designs unfortunately, despite research at the National Archives and the London Metropolitan Archives.
The development potential comparisons with the Victoria Line are salutary. To us it now seems blindingly obvious that no-one should have seen either Brixton or Walthamstow as areas of housing growth as a result of the Tube being built to those places. However, the Victoria Line was constructed in a time when ‘slum’ clearance was still an idea that had not quite died in the hearts of urban planners. Both areas would have been seen as places for the young enthusiastic urban destroyer to get stuck in. Let’s be very grateful that such notions were killed off soon after. I know that Walthamstow is now seeing a fair amount of pressure to build upwards, and its very likely that Brixton sites are being eyed up as well. Although with hindsight, basing the predictions of growth for the Jub extension into Docklands on the Victoria experience is close to stupid, we do have to realise how people thought back then.
@Fandroid – I’d go further and say that the whole notion of regeneration (in the sense of regeneration based on existing housing stock) was quite alien to planners until the Victoria Line showed the way. As late as the early ’70s, MHLG’s view on regeneration was based on complete rebuilding and they were continuing to designate New Towns such as Telford, CLNT and Cwmbran, specifically for that purpose well into the ’50s.
Graham: I don’t quite understand this. I understand that regeneration (housing people on the same land where people had previously lived) was then seen as requiring demolishing and rebuilding. But surely New Towns (housing people where only cows had previously lived) are different, you have no choice as to whether to upgrade or demolish existing housing, as there isn’t any.
@Anonymously
The plans for the Docklands Southern Relief Road were leaked to the Evening Standard at the time and the resulting outcry killed the scheme. The GLC never denied that the plans were accurate. You can, in fact, still find them in the National Records Office at Kew, if you want to see the details.
It’s not surprising really as this came only a few years after the ring ways were abandoned as a result of public pressure and the same mentality towards building roads was evident in both schemes. As Greg says at 0952, it’s hard for us today to appreciate fully just how much the establishment of the time saw that road building was the way of the future and public transport was in terminal decline. As late as the mid 1980s, a very senior planner at London Transport told me that there was genuinely a ‘secular decline’ in the use of public transport which was impossible to halt. (I replied that I was all in favour of religious declines but did not accept that secular declines existed.)
@Malcolm
There was also a strong view at the time that London was ‘congested’ and that, therefore, people and economic activity had to be shifted away from London to give space for London to function effectively with a smaller and less dense city. Hence the GLC also engaged in a new and expanded towns programme, complementing the new towns designated by the MHLG, which led to the massive growth in places such as Basingstoke, Andover and Ashford. The Location of Offices Bureau, whose function was to get offices moved out of London, was only closed in about 1977, by Peter Shore as Environment Secretary, as the growing recognition of an inner city crisis came to a head.
@Malcolm – it was certainly the case that the earlier rounds of New Town designation (eg Hemel, Stevenage) were designed to relieve the “congestion” mentioned by quinlet, but some later ones were designated to deal with specific problems including regeneration of existing communities. From memory,Telford was designated to deal with an area of rundown small towns and rural dereliction, Skem and CLNT also; Corby and Cwmbran were designated to accommodate new steel works and their workforce in areas of generally rundown and insufficient housing.
Moving people and/or jobs out of London has long been attempted. The methods change – today it’s send the BBC to Manchester, Northern Poorhouse, etc, and back then it was Location of Office Bureau and New Towns. Yes there is a secular change – it seems we don’t build New Towns any more, for instance, we just double the size of selected Old ones.
There is also a secular change in that we are nowadays far less inclined to demolish basically sound housing to build something different in its place. Instead we renovate where possible.
I recognise all this. But I just do not see any connection (except an apparently co-incidental one of time-frame) between these two secular changes.
Graham: my message crossed with yours. I think I can perhaps see what you are getting at. I am not familiar with Telford, but you are perhaps indicating that the way it dealt with the rundown towns it subsumed was somewhat demolition-heavy. That did not happen with Milton Keynes (which was of course a bit later) – that engulfed Bletchley and the other 11 towns/villages in a fairly delicate way – very little housing was demolished (though many original residents who were able to do so moved out anyway, understandably).
Briantist,
Never was a place in Central London so bypassed in terms of transport.
Not quite central London but, in the days of the big docks, I read that little effort was made to connect the docks area with the rest of London. The rest of London was happy to keep the docks isolated and the people living there tended not to leave their community much.
In a real life Passport to Pimlico scenario, the Isle of Dogs once declared independence – and that is within living memory for some.
CLNT is Central Lancashire New Town
MHLG is the Ministry of Housing and Local Government
I think there may be a word missing – “without much high-density that might”. Perhaps “development” should be added?
Thank you for an interesting review of the JL history. Others have highlighted the benefit of our hindsight but it does all feel a bit like “another planet” in terms of the strategies, the politics, the costs (!) and the lack of depth and knowledge about what was happening and what might happen. It’s a wonder anything was ever done. I can see now that Tyne and Wear achieved an absolute miracle (or stonking deceit) in getting the Metro completed. I can certainly recall, despite not being a teenager at the time, the local paper saying the Metro might be stopped with half built tunnels and holes in the ground left unfinished in Newcastle City Centre. I remember being “outraged” (if that’s possible at that age) about the Metro possibly not being finished.
The huge irony now is that almost everything the GLC were struggling to justify has been or is being built and in some instances we’ve built it 2 or 3 times over! Can you imagine the government palpitations in early 1979 if that had formed the basis of a prediction as to what was needed to serve Docklands and East London?
For those wondering about reliance on roads then just pop along to any new housing development away from London. I happened to be looking at an area, north of Newcastle, on Google Maps earlier, that I remember as green fields. Now it’s full of roads, roundabouts, new schools and lots of houses and they’re still building. The same has happened in parts of North Tyneside – some of it is industrial development – but again loads of roads, junctions, car parks and not a lot of walking / cycle lanes / public transport. London’s approach to things is really very different but so is the scale of the challenge. Oh and Val Shawcross described the Boris idea of building new road tunnels to ease London congestion as “bonkers” this week. It would probably be considered completely ideal elsewhere in the UK.
I look forward to the next part with Ken vs Hezza vs Ridley / Thatcher. 😉
@quinlet…The fact these plans continued to exist after the Ringways scheme was axed still surprises me, even allowing for the ‘road is the future’ views that were prevalent back then. You would have thought the GLC would have quietly canned them, after all the political furore over the Ringways proposals. I was intrigued since I have never come across any details anywhere on the main British roads sites on the web (CBRD, SABRE, Pathetic Motorways) about this particular scheme before now.
As an aside, it is rather revealing that London is now more congested and crowded than ever, having reached its pre-war population peak, yet the government is no longer prepared to engage in further megalomaniac schemes to disperse people away from the city.
@WW…You can add to that the Glasgow Subway, which was refurbished and rebuilt in the late 70s when one suspects in slightly different political circumstances it would have been easier to just shut it (as happened with the Liverpool Overhead Railway, albeit 20 years earlier).
@Anonymously
The inner cities crisis of the late 1970s/80s was a realisation that there had been virtually no investment in inner cities (outside city centres) for decades and that this was resulting in social upheval leading to things like the Brixton and Toxteth riots. By the time this issue had been worked through there was much stronger support for densification of cities as a way of ensuring both mixed developments and greater use of public transport, walking and cycling.
In London a key decision was made by Ken Livingstone in the first London Plan in that London would accept almost whatever growth was thrown at it and seek to accommodate this. There was some debate about this at the time with alternatives, such as seeking growth in the Home Counties instead, being considered. The general feeling was that it would be quite difficult to square the desires for London to be a great world city and a global financial powerhouse with plans to keep the population down by encouraging growth elsewhere. That view still stands, even though growth forecasts continue to grow with current projections leading to a potential population of 13m by 2050.
The wonder that is greenbelt has proven to be such a strong policy that it still defines the edge of London meaning that growth has to be accommodated by further densification. In turn this is likely to lead to a virtuous circle of more public transport/walking/cycling.
@Malcolm – yes, that’s it – “redevelopment” rather than “regeneration”.
More generally, picking up WW’s point about the threatened cancellation of the Tyne and Wear Metro (and one might add, also the MerseyRail Link and Loop), there was no understanding at the time of the close links between public transport infrastructure and redevelopment/regeneration, and no metrics or quantifiable analytic systems for handling it. No such thing as EMME2 or its modern equivalent.
At the time (early ’70s) ,I was part of the team setting up the then new TSG system and making the awards of grant against local authorities’ bids. The arguments they were putting forward for all these items of infrastructure were focussed on “We must have our share”, not “regeneration”. And Ministers were quite happy to go along with this pork barrel approach (well, they would be, wouldn’t they?). The discussions in the office were all about “can we fit Link and Loop etc into the available funds” and who should we squeeze to accommodate it. The problem with the Fleet Line was that it was so big that it swallowed all the “free” money and then some, so the otherwise tacit process of giving each PTE one big scheme would have fallen apart. [BTW, it was Manchester’s inability to sort out and define its “showcase” scheme that delayed it getting anything at all – if it had been slippier off the mark in playing the TSG game, it would have had Picc-Vic or whatever years ago].
@ Anonymously – if we look at some of the conclusions from the Roads Task Force and the apparent endorsement of “ring” tunnels and shoving the M4 into a tunnel in West London I’d argue the Ringway idea isn’t dead at all. It’s alive and well and lurking in the dark awaiting a champion. Obviously there is also a lot of opposition and there is far more concern about air quality these days but let’s not fool ourselves that the desire to concrete over places and put motorways through London has completely gone away.
Shoving the M4/A4 into a tunnel is about undoing the mistakes of the Ringways era where they built a massive unsightly elevated road. And a lot of the ring tunnel idea was about removing traffic from the surface allowing restructuring of Euston Road and other parts of the IRR to be better for buses, cyclists and pedestrians (as well as demolishing the Westway and Marylebone Flyover).
Most Western European cities of size have been adding new urban expressways in the last few years (or will in the next few), with English cities being the notable omissions from a list where this has happened. Most of these routes are tunnelled and about taking cars off the city streets above, allowing a de-concreting of the cityscape – or at least a handover of land from cars to pedestrians, cyclists and public transport, rather than improving journey times or encouraging car use.
@ Walthamstow Writer
There is a major difference between the Ringways proposal, which would have slotted NEW motorways through the heart of London, and burying EXISTING roads underground, which is much more in the spirit of Boston’s Big Dig
Imagine sticking the M4 Chiswick flyover underground, it would be a great benefit to the area. Of course, this sort of tunnelling will never happen due to the cost.
@ Mikey C / Si – they may well have stuck expressways in tunnels but that’s NOT the same as putting an existing road (not an expressway) underground. the Boston Big Dig was a financial and project disaster area – don’t think we need that. The problem with the Roads Task Force was how on earth do you cater for on and off ramps and junctions. You can’t put the Euston Road underground and preserve existing connectivity into bordering districts. To the extent that junctions can’t be provided you have to retain the surface road so you gain little overall. You can’t build junctions from a tunnelled M4 in West London with severe damage to local areas. Sure the elevated road is a monstrosity – the better idea would be to close it without replacement and wait for the traffic to melt away as a result of the capacity reduction.
What may work elsewhere may or may not work here. The problem remains that air quality concerns are contrary to any agenda which would see an overall increase in road capacity. Furthermore a road building policy that resulted in the loss of housing would be beyond the comprehension of most Londoners given the housing crisis.
@WW – perhaps Mikey C and Si should look at the plans for the Euston Road/Hampstead Road intersection to get some idea of what is needed by way of ramps. That intersection required the demolition of the entirety of Bloomsbury, much of Fitzrovia and the southern part of Camden Town. Now, multiply that by N for all the junctions needed and you’d be lucky to have Westminster surviving on a traffic roundabout…
Graham H’s description of the ‘pork-barrel’ funding system in the 1970s which London’s Fleet Line threatened to bust just reminds us how different things have been more recently. Possibly, projects like DLR, Tramlink, Crossrail and the Overground have actually busted that barrel, but other cities have still had their projects, even if the scale has been reduced a bit and the rail-based ones are mostly tram systems.
@Si
I’m not sure what cities you are talking about. Very few Western European cities are currently adding new expressways, underground or not. The problem, as WW points out, are the ramps and the construction sites. The most popular proposal at present is the suggestion that the Hammersmith flyover can be replaced by a tunnel. But of the schemes on offer, the ‘short’ scheme, simply replacing the current flyover, needs ramps of more than a quarter of a kilometre on each side which will create massive severance, particularly between King Street and the river, while better links on this axis are what are being sought. To get round this problem, two ‘long’ schemes have been proposed with entry ramps west of Hogarth roundabout. Yet these will only take half of the traffic currently using the flyover (because of turning and short journeys) just adding to the traffic problem in Hammersmith gyratory, relief of which is the other main objective.
I would be very surprised, therefore, if any such scheme will turn out to be acceptable, and nowhere else in London has anywhere like the level of popular support for a tunnel.
The problem with all the previous Mayor’s tunnel proposals, were that they were all generated by models, without much consideration for the real world. Indeed, the modellers first and best proposals were for two tunnels under central London, one east-west and one north-south, with a junction and entry/exit slip roads in Covent Garden – until contact with the real world led these to be laughed out.
Given the commentaries above about London road policies in the 1970s and 80s, I should also point out that the generally non-public road widening lines – eg long term planning provision for many existing main roads to be widened to 4 or dual-carriageway 6-lanes – weren’t deleted by the GLC until the 1981-86 Ken Livingstone and Dave Wetzel era.
There are many roads in inner London which still exhibit a variable width along their route, between the highway kerb edge and the start of property development. This illustrates the historic consequence of planning controls requiring movement back of frontages (when the opportunity arose) to permit ultimate road widening and bigger road junctions. This had been a policy begun in the days of the LCC.
Even if some Ringways were cancelled in the 1970s, the road widening policies might still have led to semi-Ringway outcomes on principal inner London roads. The period from 1974 (GLDP decision, see the Layfield report) to the mid 1980s was therefore a critical one for the future well-being of public transport, and development densities, in what is now London Oyster Zones 2 and 3.
‘Secular decline’ of public transport outside Central London (see Quinlet above, 14/7, 21:53) was one of the issues which was debated hotly within and outside the GLDP process in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was only the Part 3 London Transportation Study report ‘Movement in London’ of 1969 which started the process of considering public transport improvement options – everything before that from the GLC planners had been based on a classic American-style forward demand ‘gravity’ planning model based on projections of increasing car ownership and usage.
I still have the LTS modelling reports from that period, and, reading them again, they are truly alarming from the perspective of the 2010s. It was GLDP issues such as those which led me to get involved in the North London Line Committee from the 1973 period onwards.
I saw the NLL as a key ‘front line’ railway which would be a litmus test for London’s urban environment. The NLL had previously had been under huge threats (which are well documented). It needed to be defended and improved, so that the inner suburbs it served could themselves be less car-dependent and maintain high population densities.
The change in London transport policy pressures between the 1963 Beeching report and 2013, have been covered in this linked presentation that I gave at the London Transport Museum in late 2013, at a “50 years after Beeching” seminar.
http://www.jrc.org.uk/beeching-and-London.html
@ JR – would I be correct in guessing that you have a rather large filing system and research library? I just loved the way you casually said at the Assembly Budget Cttee “here is the LT 1983 Annual report. I have all of them from 1933.” at which point (I think) Caroline Pidgeon gasped and chuckled at the same time. You then deftly went on to outline the revenues, costs and profits of LT International throughout its life and then concluding that the prospective TfL Consultancy might not be a great money spinner. Classic stuff. 😉
Re WW,
The spreadsheet catalogue alone for JR’s library is suitably large and impressive 🙂
@WW
Er yes! It is a research library, but not (yet) systematic with its filing…
@WW/JR – I do hope that the library is safeguarded into the future…
@ Graham H – I must admit to wondering, when JR said he had LT annual reports back to 1933, whether the LT company archives would be a match for the JR archive.
One of the other points that J did not mention about the hidden effects of pro-road policies is to do with traffic forecasts, particularly during the ‘predict and provide’ era (to which we are just returning). Despite traffic levels in London stagnating since the 1980s and now falling, DfT forecasts continue to predict massive growth in car ownership and use in London. If my memory serves they are currently predicting about a 30% increase in both by about 2040, just as they are predicting similar massive increases in traffic across the country. Despite their very poor record compared to actuality, these forecasts are still being used to drive roads policy in much of the country and still, to a certain extent, drive DfT views on transport in London, especially at the interface with the national road network.
@ Quinlet
I understand the underlying difference of TfL’s approach to traffic forecasting is that they do not assume an automatic link between GDP growth and traffic growth. Car ownership and household income levels are not assumed to feed directly into car usage levels.
There is a tendency elsewhere to use such parameters as a modelling baseline – so that you get what you always thought and then provided for! Particularly in inner London, the generally good to high levels of public transport accessibility (true on average if not uniformly), and provision of cycle facilities etc, has diminished or removed that link between car ownership, income and car travel. Otherwise Hampstead would ‘benefit’ from a Ringway One, and Highgate from an Archway Road widening, which is exactly what the GLC thought in the GLDP!!
Non-road expansion options are of course harder to sustain in lower-density outer London, where public transport is generally weaker. [What evidence of different travel behaviour is available from the Tramlink-served area?] Nevertheless there are few road expansions in outer London, and considerable attention to bus service levels.
The geography of radical differences in public transport provision and service quality one side and the other of the Greater London boundary – buses one side being regulated and funded, vs unregulated and variable funding support the other side – has been commented on separately by Graham H and others.
I understand that Highways Agency modelling outwards from the London boundary still allows linkage between car ownership/income levels and forward projections for car usage, and with GDP inputs for lorry mileage. This feeds into the Strategic Road Network (SRN) planning. Similarly there are TOC/Network Rail/Rail Executive projections for rail travel.
The institutional simplicity of separate budgeting and the internal need of each modal organisation to have a degree of budget and project certainty makes swappability of funds between modes rather unlikely outside major city areas, even though a true multi-modal planning basis should allow for that!
Back to the article. Apart from national funding constraints in the mid-late 1970s, the key underlying failing of the Fleet/Jubilee extension project was that no-one went out of their way to make a case for a higher-density docklands which in turn would have provided a stronger baseline for a tube business case. The 1976 LDSP locked in low-density projections, and a semi-industrial/business park development pattern which didn’t foresee large new volumes of commuting to/from Central London. This despite the fact that a tube line would enable higher development densities (either as cause or effect). This matter is covered further in Parts 3-5.
@quinlet (and others) re: car use and growth.
Electric self-driving cars, innit ??
Mike P
Believe it when I see it ….
The self-drive (& successful) experiments by Google et al have:
1: All been in “built-up” areas
2: Subject to a 25 mph speed limit.
3: And the areas covered have been/are regularly re-surveyed in great detail …..
If you want to extend that model to round here (say) where, less than 10 miles from my house, you are outside the M25, the roads may have no demarcated edges & the speed limits vary up to 60 mph, from 20, then good luck with it.
@PoP was it not Pimlico that declared independence? The film is “Passport to Pimlico” after all!
@Tim Burns
Unlike the events on the Isle of Dogs discussed by PoP, “Passport to Pimlico” was entirely fictional. (Strictly speaking, Pimlico did not declare independence, but claimed to be an exclave of Burgundy, and therefore presumably under French rule).
Incidentally, most of the location filming for PtP was actually made in Lambeth, around here
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4944146,-0.1162553,3a,75y,43.5h,99.72t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sl17iwAvjoDHsi2JwmZQC6w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1
Jonathan Roberts
I think the reason that the case was not robustly made for high-density development in Docklands,was that those responsible where overwhelmed at the size (in acres) of the task facing them.
At the time I read a report on development of Docklands from a planning perspective,and there were genuine worries that,as the area was so vast,and so isolated in relative terms,that for much of the area they would be grateful for ANY development,however,umm,un-dense it may be.The worry was rather that land may lie undeveloped for decades.
It is easy,again with hindsight,to be incredulous at this attitude,but at the time it was quite reasonable…No-one in thei right mind would have built in Beckton then,and they couldn’t justify public transpoert (or even road) improvements,as the demand was negligible,and the concept of infrastructure to stimulate development was hard to sell.
Very interesting to compare the funding/planning climate between now and then, and to see that sometimes things are actually a lot better than the good ol’ days. On the various comments above on Ringways, Victoria Line and housing density, in 1968 all of the above were slated for Brixton, with complete flattening and the construction of two clusters of 50-storey housing blocks over a 15-year development period. Changes of personnel at Lambeth, County Hall, and financial climate made much of this unravel within 3-4 years, even before the Ringways met their demise. The series of planning policy documents over the decades make fascinating reading, as in each successive re-issue, the ‘grand plan’ ambition decreases, and the short term need to address the social problems and downward spiral of commercial activity increases.
There is considerable pressure now, as in Walthamstow, for housing densification. Three large sites on Brixton Hill have just been flattened to make way for much higher and denser residential, some of it to pay for new council offices. Low rise council housing at the north end of the town centre is also due to be replaced with denser mixed housing, up to 20 storeys high, and there is the continuing high profile dispute over Cressingham Gardens, in which ‘they’ say the only way to progress is to replace a very well laid out low-rise estate in need of repairs with more-desnser-bigger. The presumption is certainly not on retaining existing stock. I would go as far as saying that the dark art of viability statements is being used to do exactly what the grand 1968 plan proposed for the out of condition and, at the time, often unloved multiple ranks of Victorian terraces, only this time on council estates for private gains.
Much as London needs a lot more housing, the way about doing it is not finding much favour with anyone I know, especially when it’s neither affordable nor ‘affordable’. Those in the position of planning for future needs could not have possibly predicted the falls and rises of these areas (let alone how Docklands would pan out) back in the day. The Brexit curveball may now delay investment in this sort of new-build housing, since some large tracts of Nine Elms are about to come on to a market that’s in a distinctly wobbly mood. They will presumably sell, but lower returns may alter the calculations on other large slash-and-burn schemes in the pipeline for some time. It would be nice to think that any such hiatus could be used for working out a proper policy for catering for London’s population increase.
@Slugabed
You may well be right. Even when the Beckton DLR scheme was being promulgated, it was seen as possibly a Dock too far! It is reasonable to conclude that the GLC’s long-standing involvement with Thamesmead dragged the early River/Jubilee Line schemes to too distant and low density a destination. Upstream Docklands were seen sooner as having some development potential, but Part 2 shows that even such shorter distance schemes, say to Surrey Docks or Millwall, weren’t cutting the mustard.
If you look into the history of Docklands and then the LDDC it is interesting to see how limited the ambitions seem compared to what we have now. It is also important that many of the original plans were driven by the politics of the time and historical context of the time.
The Earliest plans for regeneration during Heath (before the 74 property crash) did look sort of look like modern docklands, but at a much less ambitious scale.
The plans would have seen a “mini-tram” network across docklands with a significant private housing development and an office cluster on the Isle of Dogs (back office and support functions). There would have still been still significant council house building but little industrial and little in the way of Docks activity.
This outraged old councils and change of government saw these plans end.
We then enter the period of militant entryism into inner london councils and radical opposition to the expansion of central London activities into inner London. This period is characterised by lots people plans 100% grass roots engagements etc.
This produced plans for industrial only related development, with most of the Docks filled in and the rest being filled with 100% council housing for locals only etc. Where possible dock industries were to be retained.
The likelyhood of any happening was nil. As modern industry had migrated from muti storey mills to large one storey warehouse units with excellent motorway access. This requires very large plots at a low cost. This was never going to happen to anywhere West of Canning Town.
Come the rise of the LDDC ( I have an excellent book on it’s history and the development from viewpoints from across the political spectrum). The original plans were for low to mid density development. Mostly as new space for support industries and service firms for the Central London economy. Crinkly tin sheds and low rise apartment blocks and small office blocks. Many thought this vision as desperately ambitious.
We tend to forget that the early 1980’s were the low point in London’s population and people did not see the coming change when the shackles from London’s growth were removed.
The Geography of Docklands with it’s winding river bends meant that the main roads and rail lines avoided the area and it was terra incognita for many Londoners with few bus services and a locals only community that were closely tied to the Docks and rarely ventured far.
One of the biggest criticism of the LDDC at the time was that did not have a formal plan outlining exactly how many houses and what sort of business would go where,
(To be honest most architects and planners still screech about it, and how we could have grand avenues and cohesive development etc).
The truth is that the combination of the go go 80’s boosterism and the lack of plan meant there was nothing to stop people pushing ever more ambitious schemes. Until Canary Wharf arrived with the force tap dancing elephant to a frankly stunned LDDC and it was all “umm okat then” Canary Wharf got off to construction is a very quick time, such a massive development with no infrastructure plan in place, no long public inquiry, reviews of structure plans. Years and years of negotiations. (contemporary geography texts are full of academic texts condemning it all)
Once construction started though, central government had to do something than the tiddly little DLR which had only scraped past much treasury resistance.
If we had strong plan, then it would have been filled with low rise houses and apartment blocks. Just another inner London neighbourhood, with a quirky little elevated train.
The DLR might have gone to the Royal Docks, but unlikely anything that involved tunnelling.
Maybe instead, office blocks would have obliterated Aldagte, Shoreditch and the SouthBank instead.
@Greg T, Mike P
Please note that self-driving/autonomous vehicles are off-topic and any future such comments may well be snipped without warning.
LBM
@rational plan – actually, the DLR was opposed by Nick Ridley (as Secretary of State for Transport); he conceded the plan provided it cost no more than £75m cash – a tough condition. There were no plans to send it to the Royals. In general, you are right, tho’ – Docklands was not seen as an opportunity – indeed DTp had hardly clocked it as an issue -its last previous serious engagement with the transport implications was to reject LDDC’s plans for a Docklands trolleybus scheme.
Re Greg’s “2: Subject to a 25 mph speed limit.” it is noticeable how Islington, Hackney, and Camden have all moved to blanket 20mph limits across their boroughs. It is likely others will (sadly, imho) follow suit. Although buses are supposed to follow these limits many don’t, but if they did it would, I believe, push up the ‘value’ of rail (OG/UG) connectivity as not being subject to such limits.
Following up on Rational Plan’s quote “a locals only community that were closely tied to the Docks and rarely ventured far,” I think it’s interesting that even today locals on the Isle of Dogs and Poplar still refer to it as “the island.” Contrast this to many newcomers to London or the area who will simply refer to the Isle of Dogs as Canary Wharf.
The Docklands name seems to be far less used these days than in the eighties and nineties perhaps as neighbourhoods within this large space have once again found their own identity as a result of development, new stations and even the DLR losing the Docklands from its name. (Off topic but a similar thing has happened in Haggerston which has regained its own identity thanks to the Overground stop, new homes, bars and restraurants. Ten-15 years ago it was largely called Hackney or Dalston but now Haggerston has come back into favour.)
It is interesting to note that the plans for the Isle of Dogs favoured the the retention of the docks (West India and Millwall docks) themselves as following from the experience of St Katherine’s Dock the dock ponds were suddenly seen as an asset. Contrast that with Surrey Docks which at their height were as large as the City of London and it was latticed with docks and ponds. If they were being considered for development today the existence of the ponds and docks would be seen as offering added value whereas the decision at the time was to infill as far as possible (apart from Greenland Dock and Canada Water) and replace with low level commercial development. The presence of water was seen as a liability and a wasted asset. Unimaginative but typical of the thinking of the period.
AlisonW. Tower Hamlets also has 20mph limit.
Re buses and that limit. I thought tfl had announced that their fleet will be fitted with GPS based speed limiters, so buses will obey the 20 limit.
RichardB. Compare an old photo of the West India Docks with now and you’ll see that a lot of former acreage of these docks is now reclaimed. The new Wood Wharf development (east side of Canary Wharf) is reclaiming another large section of WI dock.
Anon
As in:
“In ‘aggeston, ‘arringay & ‘ackney, Hurricanes, Hardly ever Happen ??
IslandDweller: That TfL announcement only commits to (trying to) ensure that new buses bought from 2017 are so equipped. Retro-fitting does not seem to be on the table, so buses able to exceed speed limits will be around for quite some time.
Indeed, West India Docks is being seriously nibbled away as time passes. After all, Crossrail has gobbled a large chunk of the northern basin. Where there is strong demand for development , as in anywhere near to Canary Wharf, then it’s inevitable that space will be created at the expense of expanses of open water. Surrey Docks were not the only ones to largely disappear early on. London Docks in Wapping disappeared too. While it would seem over-nostalgic to desire the preservation of all the docks as there were, it would have been great to have only filled in parts of the bigger ones and used them to create an interlinked network of navigable waterways. A Big Venice as opposed to Little Venice.
@Graham H…Well, I bet he was pleased when it came in at £77 million for the first stage! This is about £200 million today after allowing for inflation, which still feels relatively good value for what was then a fairly technologically advanced system.
Still, time and hindsight has revealed this to be the falsest of false economies…..if the scale of development had been anticipated back then, I suspect those Fleet Line plans outlined in the article above would have been dusted off a lot sooner before the current JLE that we got was formulated. It surprises me though that your ex-boss was so adamantly opposed to it…..how was he expecting people to get there without clogging up the local roads? By carrier pigeon?
While the plans to extend the fleet/Jubilee line beyond Charing Cross never happened we still got the DLR which covered some the areas the extended tube line was meant to cover. However, because of the limited funds made available for the DLR we have ended up spending a large amount of money expanding the stations etc twice over to cope with growth and some stations are still to short for full trains .
With the problem that the network ends at the awkward terminal at Bank Station .
Of course the Jubilee line did eventually get extended to docklands via Waterloo as part of the plans for Canary Wharf . However , while it came with far better stations than London had seen in the past it’s still debatable if it might have been better to have say built a new line to main line gauge and linked it to South Western trains instead .
As for the planned cross river link between Stratford we got the DLR to Woolwich instead together with the Jubilee Line crossing the river .
However, given the increasing demand on the East London line Overground trains and the problems of expanding Brunels stations together with The Mayor and TFL wanting to take over South Eastern rail services then plans for a tunnel linking North London line Overground at Stratford to Woolwich in SE London might yet come about .
Anonymously: There was then (and possibly still is) a group of politicians who automatically think all public transport is bad. The question of “how else will people get there?” just does not occur to such people (they may suppose that everyone will just give the necessary instruction to their chauffeur).
Malcom
Can I make a slight amendment to that?
[ Particularly when one consider people like the IEA “Think-Tank” (You should excuse the word) approach? ]
Namely:
There was then,and still is, a smallish group of politicians who automatically think all rail-based public transport is bad.
[ Buses are GOOD because they are private & deregulated & …. flying is good too, because it’s “sexy” …. ]
Greg: Your amendment is noted. However, we are both being a bit speculative and stereotyping here, and speculation of this kind is discouraged on LR, so perhaps we had better leave at that, or we’ll both be snipped.
But. We must remember that Graham’ s boss actually did approve the DLR, and from that little acorn mighty oaks are continually being proposed. It presumably went from concept to operational in the blink of an eye compared with Crossrail. Pioneering projects like that can only happen if their promoters are very skilled at Realpolitik. Don’t forget that Docklands was only thought of as a low/medium density development in those days. It was the Big Bang in the City in 1986 that meant that something quite different might actually turn up, driven by (foreign) private money. Look at Surrey Docks for a comparison. It didn’t get any new public transport investment until TfL was in existence and the Overground concept was born.
I admit to a big goof in my previous post. Surrey Docks got the JLE at Canada Water, but that was because it was on the way to Canary Wharf. No doubt that wild generalisation will be given the proper LR treatment in the next instalment.
F
And, as I do not doubt, the next part will show, the manoeuvrings gone through during 1979-90, followed by the next 10 years to completion.
Which means, of course, that the “JLE” actually took as long as Crossrail from proposal-to-completion, does it not?
I suppose we should all read this and then send them corrections, or better still a set of links to our pages?
[ How does one do a smiley, btw? ]
Greg: any shortcomings of Wikipedia are a frequently recurring theme here, I don’t think we need to make an issue of them. One does a smiley like this: 🙂
To be slightly more helpful, one types a colon immediately followed by a closing parenthesis, the whole lot surrounded by spaces. Nice though smiling is, contributors (this is not aimed at you Greg) should not treat a smiley as a way of de-offensiveising something otherwise offensive.
People think if they only knew the potential then we would have got the Jubilee from the start and all sorts of grand urban visions. HA ha ha ha. The most likely outcome would have been a big political fight by the City to retain it’s core business and the surrounding councils fighting against all this capitalist development that would have benefited the rich and not locals etc. Most of centred around “it’s not in the Local Plan” and waiting for the next one is often a 10 year process. Under the conventional British system Canary Wharf would have been ground down and defeated, with the private company walking away.
We forget prior to this all large scale schemes in the UK were government led. Canary Wharf was out of this world, and even though we are used to mega schemes these days, most are still public-private partnerships.
“The 1974-1979 Labour Government’s preferred Docklands strategy was to invigorate and regenerate the industrial sector of the Docklands. This was also the GLC’s published position, so the Government had a pre-prepared policy to use as a baseline. However the Government believed that the Jubilee line would not support this goal, and that the Tube line was more likely to attract residents to the Docklands to funnel workers into central London to work than to support and grow existing Docklands industries and jobs.”
Looking at that original Jubilee Line plans, the Isle of Dogs station would have been at Millwall, which is a bit south from Canary Wharf, and I can see what they mean, it would have been great for people from the IoD who worked in central London, but would it have attracted business the other way?
The original DLR may have delivered far less capacity between central London and the IoD, but what it did do was deliver an eye catching means of transport towards and around the IoD; it served a far greater area than the Jubilee Line would have done, not least the station at Island Gardens connecting to the Greenwich Foot tunnels.
@Rational Plan: As modern industry had migrated from muti storey mills to large one storey warehouse units with excellent motorway access. This requires very large plots at a low cost. This was never going to happen to anywhere West of Canning Town
Actually there was light industrial development in western Docklands right up until the mid 1980s – most notably the relocation of almost London’s entire newspaper printing industry to Wapping (News International) and the Isle of Dogs (the Guardian Print Centre until the IRA bomb, and West Ferry Printers AKA Telegraph/Express and later Guardian). In turn freeing up office space in Fleet Street for the financial services industry (who would have benefitted from a tube line along the street…). Docklands has pretty good motorway access if you count the East Cross Route as a motorway (which much of it used to be).
Since then financially sinking newspapers have decided to cash in on the rising land values and decamp to beyond the M25.
@Graham H: There were no plans to send it to the Royals
Maybe not in the 80s but there were in 1979 – see that “Northern alignment – Busway, Light Rail System or Underground” in the first map in the article, complete with the perennial tantalising prospect of continuing over the river to Thamesmead…
@Fandroid – the DLR decision wasn’t one for the Secretary of State for Transport: LDDC was Environment’s creature,not Transport’s. Ridley did,in fact, fight DOE all the way to Cabinet on the case. The silo mentality (and personal antagonism of the two Secretaries of State) was reflected in LDDC’s wish to promote its “own” self-contained transport system unconnected to the rest of the world.
The print Industry only remained in the Docks because they felt there still needed to be a geographical link with their newspaper offices and the requirement to keep large number of printers (well some of them). They have all long fled to M25 locations as staffing requirements have changed with new technology.
The Western Docks were no longer suited for heavy industry and far too expensive and unsuited for large scale light industry. The idea that any company was going to set up new industrial facilities in the London area and pay London wages, rents and suffer London congestion was for the birds. The local authorities of the time were not prepared to face the future and wanted to recreate the past, for political reasons.
A. because that is what people in those areas would like and could only see themselves getting jobs in.
B. It was part of the then prevalent militant political philosophy that was sweeping Inner London and therefore romanticised old industry as bedrocks of the working class and decried the new international capitalist industries.
Things only really got underway when they imposed a old fashioned Development Corporation on the area to get things done.
You’ll notice that they resurrected the old Development Corporation model for the Olympic park and Old Oak Common area.
For illustrations of just how separate the DLR looked in early days, I can recommend this LR article.
The DLR was only ‘unconnected to the rest of the world’ in the sense that it was a light railway and no other ones existed in London. It was connected to BR lines at Limehouse and Stratford, and the Tube at Shadwell and Stratford. If you are trying to create a modern transport system on a tiny budget, you don’t spend big money on the tunnels that would be necessary to provide more connections in more directions. In fact, once the DLR had kick-started Docklands, those tunnels turned up fairly swiftly!
@Fandroid – indeed,what was created was a load of poorly integrated physical frontiers with the rest of the transport system -Tower Gateway being the classic case (Limehouse is a very odd place, too,to put a connexion with the LTS, and Shadwell for the tube was a connexion to a poorly connected branch line.) And the result of shoestring has been a continuing multi-billion programme to put in those connexions and upgrade the system -billions that could have been saved had the job been done properly in the first place. The evil that we do lives after us …
@rational plan – and the problem with the Development Corporation model is that it is too tightly focussed on a specific geographical area. The inevitable conflicts with democratically-elected surrounding authorities and others who have wider statutory responsibilities (eg LRT) don’t help either. In the caseof LDDC,not only was the NTDC model followed, but there was a considerable influx of ex-NT people, too (from Northampton,I seem to recall)
@ Graham H, Fandroid
Quite – although the (original) DLR’s connectivity with the rest of the transport network would have been even poorer had the northern branch turned left at Bow to run down the Mile End Road as envisaged by LRT and not right onto the railway alignment to Stratford, a later iteration. That had the extra benefit of granting the LDDC its wish of an automated railway and, hey presto, the DLR as we know it was born.
THC
@THC – one of the interesting questions is what might have happened had the Fleet Line been built as planned – would. for example, the pattern of development in Docklands have been as now? The question is unanswerable, except perhaps to say that Stratford might well have been the clear focus of the redevelopment as Heseltine originally intended, rather than a collection of down-at-heel shopping centres some way away from the Wharf action.
@GH
The present day outcome is that East London now has two designated Satellite Activity Zones (Canary AND Stratford) but that SE London – and South London generally – has none at all!
There must be some relationship even in hindsight between freed-up planning controls à la LDDC, available development lands, and eventually ample supply of better rail and light rail services.
Journey time proximity to Central London might also be relevant – so Docklands poor on access until DLR then JubeTube. Views welcome!
JR: Hmm, where does Surrey Docks fit in to this paradigm? Presumably the supply of land was once adequate there (I’m not clear what it’s been used for since), and the rail connectivity is reasonable (if only you could get onto one of the frequent trains), but of course it did not have the benefit of a “red-tape-free” corporation.
@ Malcolm
Unclear! It was actually part of the LDDC area, but I believe that by the early 1980s the Surrey Docks area had largely been filled in. Quite why that would make a big difference, I don’t know.
However it is fair to observe that the planning thrust in that locality had tended towards housing during the previous decade – think of the SE London and the Fleet Line report, focused on Surrey Docks and commissioned by LT in 1973 from that memorable group of planners, Llewellyn Davies Forestier Weeks and Bor. (Another one taking up shelf space at home…!). The LDSP consultation mini-plans for each district, ca. 1975, might illuminate the local options a bit more.
Also the Fleet Line to Lewisham wasn’t entirely dead as a desire, catering for conventional commuting (as discussed in Part 1), while the scope for an ELL extension north to Liverpool Street and/or south towards Peckham had a bit of street cred around the mid 1980s. Steer Davies Gleave did a report for BRB about that, ahead of the later LT-sponsored ELLX schemes.
So overall I wouldn’t rule out that the Surrey Docks/Quays turned out to be an example of a more conventional style of development – that might have occurred elsewhere in different circumstances.
@ Malcolm – I’m no expert but Surrey Docks and Rotherhithe is largely an area of housing these days with a little bit of retail. A few months ago I went round the Rotherhithe peninsula on the C10 bus and was really suprised how the place had grown (I’d not been “round the edge” for a long time). Now the area faces a massive challenge because a very extensive redevelopment and densification of housing is planned although nearer to Canada Water. Something similar is planned for the Greenwich Peninsula. I mention both of these because they are either side of Canary Wharf which continues to grow. The transport implications for the stations either side of CW must be deeply concerning given that demand on the Jubilee Line is at saturation levels and we are not yet entirely clear how the Jub Line will be upgraded. Crossrail may bring some short term relief but we know what happens with any released capacity – it gets gobbled up and quickly.
One of the interesting “what-if”s for me revolves around the moribund LB&WIDR’s line from Victoria Park Jct to Poplar….BR “test drove” a DMU along this line around 1980 to raise publicity for a possible re-opening…presumably the re-opening to passengers of the line between Dalston West Jct and Stratford LL around the same time was in their mind’s eye,as well as the prospect of massive development in the Isle of Dogs,towards which this line was well placed for extension,perhaps but not necessarily following the old PLA lines.
It came to naught,however,for whatever reason,and then the DLR was built using part of the alignment,and the rest was rapidly obliterated (short-sightedly,in my view….DLR to Hackney,anyone? Too late now.)
A lot of the ‘what if’ issues turn on the ambition of the planning authority. As other commentators have note, prior to the LDDC, most of the planning authorities had the view that they wanted/expected relatively low density housing and/or light industry. I don’t think this was for purely ideological reasons, as some have suggested, but more because their ambition was quite low. None of the boroughs really realised just how much financial services could take off and all were very well aware of the ambitions of their residents, which were also frequently quite low – much as with many of the recent Brexiteers. Unlike the current government (which largely ignored the low expectations prior to the referendum) the boroughs at the time were wholly taken with their residents’ demands. Both views can be said to be short sighted.
The LDDC did have much higher ambitions – and these were probably as much influenced by ideology as the low level of ambitions by the boroughs. Their view the more the merrier and relatively cheap land and supported development did the remainder. Had LDDC wanted to restrain development, they could have done this, but they didn’t – and this gave its own message.
Why should Brexiteers have low expectations?
Do we need this uninformed political comment?
[Probably not. Whether uninformed or otherwise, parallels with the recent referendum are best avoided – there are too many sensitive nerves, and such parallels are likely to take us to places where we do not wish to go. Malcolm]
@Slugabed
Sorry, I’m trying to follow your comment and I’m struggling. Can you expand on
“LB&WIDR’s” London … and …. Railway?
“PLA lines”
the DLR was built using part of the alignment,and the rest was rapidly obliterated (short-sightedly,in my view….DLR to Hackney,anyone? Too late now”
So, DLR runs on the section of the “Palace Gates to North Woolwich” line from Canning Town to Stratford LL and then Stratford International.
Which DLR line to Hackney is “too late”?
Thanks.
@ Graham. The development corporations were seen as old fashioned and lacked support from local authorities, so of course were wound up from 1997 onwards. But the replacements. Shall we say a mixed record. Lots of gubbins about holistic approaches and spending money on training etc. But there was relatively little to show for, just lots of little projects scattered around, which no doubt kept many a committee fully engaged.
The problem is that each local authority tends to focus on it’s own centre and key locations. The problem occurs at the borders of an authority where neglect comes in an cross boundary co operation often falls into the too hard category.
Docklands, of course was a prime example, only a few boroughs had a large percentage of their land in the docks and for some it had long ceased to be an area of activity that they concerned themselves with. For other it was a just a narrow strip by the river along way from their main concern.
If you have a large area of poorly developed land, especially if it crosses multiple boundaries then a Development corporation is a better model. As it has clear goals, and a management structure that is held accountable to goals.
When everyone can contribute and all require buy in then, decision timescales just stretch to forever and nothing gets done.
@rational plan – I think that’s about right, except that we started to wind up the NTDC’s in 1975 (I was secretary to the DoE committee that began the process). Some went very quickly thereafter (MK was a b***** because they carefully started the development in a number of widely dispersed estates which , even to my untutored eye, spelt trouble ahead unless the entirety of their masterplan was complete, but my natural cynicism was condemned because I wasn’t a believer in the New Towns idea). I suspect part of the problem with Docklands was that there were no obvious precedents either in terms of scale or – germane to this thread – transport infrastructure. The latter point was especially difficult in London -the LAs had had no experience of public transport infrastructure, quite possibly ever, nor had their mentor, the ex-MHLG side of DoE, and nor had any (ex)NT staff; none of the NTDCs was on a scale to require investment (so they thought) in anything other than roads and the Runcorn busway. [MK toyed with the M word but mainly to show how trendy they were]. LA fragmentation didn’t help either, as you say.
@GH
“the LAs had had no experience of public transport infrastructure, quite possibly ever”
Indeed too much not in this locality, although the West Ham Corporation, East Ham etc, had run trams till 1933…!
Graham: You could say, at least with hindsight, that MK’s “centre last” policy was a trick to discourage premature closedown. But there were also other plausible reasons for doing that: employment scattered all over was intended to make best use of transport infrastructure by causing workers to whizz around every which-way in rush hours, rather than tidally – and by ensuring that rather more of them can live near their workplace. It still works to some extent. And if you want to get employers to accept non-central sites, then not installing a centre (until the pressure becomes irresistible) is a good way of achieving that.
@ Briantist – I assume the references are to the
London and Blackwall Railway
West India Docks Railway (an extension of the above)
Port of London Authority Railway. (see http://mikes.railhistory.railfan.net/r105.html)
I’m no railway historian but these are the relevant lines, extension and industrial railway network that the DLR’s alignment uses in part in various locations. Beyond that other experts here will have to help you. 😉
Briantist: and for the “too late” bit, you could look up “Old Ford” station on Wikipedia or Disused Stations.
There is of course no “Palace Gates to North Woolwich line”. There have been services between these two points at times in the past, but the service ran via Stratford.
Malcolm – I did say that at the time but was greeted with puzzled looks but it was indeed actually as stated – MK feared the next spending review – after all, CLNT had already bitten the dust, and several other cororations had had their more ambitious plans trimmed in anticipation of their eventual sale. Later in life, I came to see it was a standard ploy by client public bodies; the problem in MHLG was that, apart from the NTDCs, they had no significant practice in quango sponsorship and tended to believe that new town fairies lived at the bottom of the garden.
@Briantist
“LB&WIDR’s”
London & Birmingham & West India Docks Railway, or something like that.
This is the NLL from Chalk Farm via Highbury and Bow towards Docklands (and also Fenchurch Street), long prior to Broad Street.
Now you can assess why a 2016 DLR link to Hackney doesn’t, er, hack it…
Briantist
Apologies…the proper title was “East and West India Docks and Birmingham Junction Railway”…that’ll teach me to type without checking.
The PLA was the Port of London Authority,whose lines served the docks.
I was speculating as to what might have been,had BR succeeded in opening a branch onto the Isle of Dogs,or,had that not come to pass and the DLR been built,the line Northwards towards Hackney should have been safeguarded (but wasn’t,so it’s too late now)…
@rational plan: The print Industry only remained in the Docks
I think you are missing the point – the print industry didn’t remain in the docks, it moved to the docks in the 1980s. And it didn’t do choose Docklands to cater for ‘large numbers’ of workers because the whole point was to discard the existing large workforce and their unions. If there was any militant political agenda at work in that process, it was from the right, not the left.
Other low-density uses in the area were the London Arena (opened 1989) and the relocated Billingsgate Market (opened 1982) (was the Corporation of London one of those militant left-wing councils?)
@slugabed: Maybe the line would have fallen foul of the unwritten central government transport policy of the last 30 years that ‘you can have any transport scheme you like, so long as it goes to Stratford’.
Malcolm. Back in those days (and nowadays too for anywhere but the biggest cities) employers most definitively preferred to locate away from centres. Plenty of space for car parking and access to the open road. Milton Keynes just made it very easy.
Part of the railway line running south from Hackney (site of the infamous first railway murder) was taken over by a link road to the Blackwall tunnel. A DLR branch would have been nice, but in the views of most transport planners, it’s doing a very useful job in its current role. Opinions here many differ!
@Fandroid: I think the A12 was built alongside rather than on top of the railway – see for example the 1974 photograph here showing a twin track railway at the Old Ford station site coexisting with the dual carriageway, like the West London Line and the old M41, and an image on this page of the elaborate twin-track concrete viaduct built in 1974 to carry the moribund freight-only line over the A12.
Which makes the failure to preserve the route in any form since closure in 1983 all the more surprising – compare to the East London Line link that closed many decades ago (during the First World War?) but wasn’t built on and could be reopened.
Ian J. Fair comment. I fairly regularly walk over it from Hackney Wick station to Victoria Park. The A12 is such a dominant feature there and traces of the old line are not apparent, so I put two and two together and made 5.5. There is not a great deal there in that corner of Hackney. To have made any sense, a DLR branch would have had to have got at least as far as Hackney Central and, even better, Hackney Downs.
@IanJ: “compare to the East London Line link that closed many decades ago” – Can you elaborate please? You’ve piqued my curiosity!
@Slugabed
@Jonathan Roberts
@Malcolm
Thanks for the replies.
As an excuse for a nice walk on such a sunny day, I’ve just walked the route from Bow Church DLR to Homerton Overground via the Old Ford route, using only the View: London Sheet K – Ordnance Survey Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952
Here’s the photos…
Old Ford railway line – Google Photos
Looking at the ages of the building and roads it certainly seems probably that the alignment was lost long before the DLR was dreamt up. The northern section (from Old Ford station) is taken up by the A12 (“Pathetic Motorway”) East Cross Route that was completed in 1973.
Even if you could steal the hard shoulder of the A12 for a DLR line, the rest of the alignment is totally lost under 1980s housing.
@slugabed, 18 July at 14:13
That BR DMU run down the remains of the Poplar route was in fact arranged by the London Regional Transport (as it was then) project team to allow the Chiswick Laboratory to measure the transfer function between the rails and the dwellings built on a deck above the line at what is now I think Rainhill Way. This allowed the estimation of structure-borne vibration that might be introduced, depending on the trackform adopted. This led to the confirmation of ballasted track on that section, rather than a paved trackform as extensively used elsewhere for various reasons. I believe the issue must have been raised during consideration of what became the 1985 Act of Parliament. Note that the vehicle type was not important; the transfer function described to what extent vibration input at the rail was transmitted to the structure above.
I don’t recall the intent being overtly for scheme promotion, although it probably was used as such to a limited extent, and I certainly don’t believe that a BR service was ever considered around that time.
RNHJ
Thanks for putting a bit of flesh on the bare bones of a nearly 40-year-old memory.
I mentioned it,to some extent,to tease out more substantial recollections from others…all I remembered was that a) it took place and b) it was some kind of feasibiliuty study.
In the railway press at the time,it excited speculation about re-instituting passenger services,though how informed that speculation was,I couldn’t say.
@Briantist
The East Cross Route and NLR line to Poplar co-existed for a decade.
“it certainly seems probably that the alignment was lost long before the DLR was dreamt up”
On the contrary, the alignment existed right up until work actually started on building the first stage of the DLR
The East Cross Route was built in 1973, mainly alongside but partly (at the Hackney end) underneath the old NLR line (the 1970s viaduct carrying the NLR and shown in !an J’s photograph above has since been removed). The NLR line finally closed in 1983, when work started on converting the Bow- Poplar section for the DLR, but the section between Victoria Park Junction and Bow station (now Bow Church) was closed and has now been built on.
http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/o/old_ford/index.shtml
@Southern heights
““compare to the East London Line link that closed many decades ago” – Can you elaborate please? ”
I assume this is a reference to the link between Surrey Quays and Queens Road Peckham, the trackbed of which miraculously remained intact for almost exactly a century from withdrawal of services in 1911
http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/s/shoreditch_el/
(other sources give 1913)
http://londonconnections.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/east-london-line-phase-2.html
until work started on reopening it in about 2008 – the line reopened in 2012.
http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/s/shoreditch_el/
@Slugabed/RNHJ -we didn’t do re-openings in the ’80s, alas (had we been allowed to do so by the constraints of the PSO, intermediate stations between Willesden and Clapham would probably have been the first priority). [Spellar Act re-openings excepted,of course].
[PSO – Public Service Obligation grant from the government to make up funding shortfall on many railway lines. LBM]
@timbeau
Thanks. I think it’s an interesting point that the timing for the re-use of the line was “all off”.
Given that the the DLR was initially “constructed from 1985 to 1987” and the addition of Homerton (1985), Hackney Wick (1980) Hackney Central (1980) and Dalston Kingsland (1983) to the NLL it does seem a shame that there seemed to be such urgency to fill in the Old Ford alignment with houses.
My suspicion is that unless the DLR line could go somewhere to make a useful connection from Bow Church (say at Hackney Downs) there would be very little interest in a protected-from-development station by Victoria Park and another one by a (then) run down industrial area not that far from the Pudding Mill lane station.
It always seems a shame when alignments are filled in, but it’s not hard to see that adding in this section to the DLR could have seemed “cost inefficient” at the time.
It’s not a on par with the lost stations at places like West Green (from Seven Sisters, unrecoverable) and Muswell Hill (from Highgate, mostly recoverable) that are bus-only islands?
@Briantist…I think that the housing and other developments you saw are a lot newer than you think! As Ian J’s web links to Subterranea Britannica clearly show, the whole rail alignment between Bow and Victoria Park was preserved (one imagines at considerable expense, looking at that viaduct!) when the East Cross Route was constructed in the late 60s/early 70s. And, AFAIK, the whole alignment was still in place (with tracks in situ, but mothballed) in the early 80s when the DLR was being planned. Back then, that part of London (and Hackney more generally) was very down-at-heel, and I guess it never occurred to the planners that safeguarding the alignment for a future extension from Bow Church to Hackney Wick might be a good idea, especially since it would only have connected with the then underused North London Line for interchange at its northernmost extremity. Also, constructing a new interchange at the already constrained HAckney Wick site (thanks to the aforementioned East Cross Route….again, look at that photo!) would have been a tall, expensive order.
Of course with hindsight, I think we can all see that it might have been a good idea to at least safeguard the alignment (that viaduct was in place until the late 90s, according to the Victoria Park station page), since that whole area is still relatively bereft of public transport. But alas, we are where we are.
@Graham H…So, just out of curiosity, if the Rt. Honourable Mr Ridley was so opposed to the LDDC DLR scheme, as SoS for Transport, did *he* have any ideas (perhaps formulated by yourself or other civil servants under his direction) for how the new development should be accessed from the rest of London. Or did he (in Malcolm’s words) imagine that everyone was going tob be magically transported there in their chauffeur-driven vehicles?
And if your answer is ‘he didn’t’ or (worse) ‘he didn’t care’, then one wonders why he was in the job in the first place! ?
PS What are these Spellar Act reopenings you speak of?
@Briantist….The Palace Gates branch wasn’t a huge loss, when one considers the proximity of the Picadilly line (which was a factor in its closure, I believe….none of the trains from that branch went into Central London, I think, and so it was very lightly used). But as for the Northern Heights Ally Pally branch….don’t even get me started! ?
@Anonymously – Nick Ridley didn’t care. He thought planning was next to diabolism, and LRT (A) was yesterday’s organisation which would be wound up when the buses and tubes had been franchised or sold, as he made clear to officials during the passage of the LRT legislation. As to why he was in the job, enthusiasm for the subject matter, still less an understanding of it, has never been a qualification for office. Sometimes one strikes lucky, but rarely so. Essentially, the assumption is that Ministers are there to take the political decisions/push through the political agenda; the technical aspects are for the machinery of government to deal with… I do not think Ridley liked being in Transport at all; his stint at the Treasury was much more to his taste. For a radical libertarian as he was, Transport technology imposed too many constraints (You wouldn’t have liked his diatribe against traffic lights…)
The Spellar Act permitted the re-opening – on an experimental basis – of lines that had been closed, without any commitment to their future PSO status or funding.
@Briantist – at the time (1987) no one envisaged the DLR becoming what it is today and developments in Hackney were well outside LDDC’s remit. Nor did LRT have a role to play as the LT planning department had been castrated on re-nationalisation* – LU struggled bravely on but their planning resources were not encouraged by the Department; nor did BR have a forward planning/strategy department, other than for the purposes of renewing or upgrading (IC only) existing infrastructure – that had to wait until 1990.
*When the GLC, which had had a substantial rail planning department, was abolished, civil servants squirrelled away the surviving staff as best they could in LRT and BR.
@Graham H…Your fascinating response has inspired me to read his Wikipedia entry. All I will say about him is that he would feel right at home in the Conservative Party of today, and that Karma really does seem to exist ?.
One wishes that if suitably qualified and enthusiastic people with real ability could be found from within Parliament on the government side (there are over 300 of them, after all, plus however-many in the Lords) to run a government department, then we might be governed rather better than we are at present. On the other hand, Lord Adonis’ brief stint in the role does make me wonder whether too much enthusiasm is necessarily a good thing….
(PS I would love to hear what he had to say about traffic lights, just so I can have a bit of a laugh, but I fear I may be trying the patience of the moderators a little too much…)
I would guess that traffic lights were not subject to market forces, therefore inherently inefficient.
@Anonymously – I don’t want to try the patience of the moderators, so perhaps I’d better just say that a little knowledge coupled with great enthusiasm is a dangerous thing in Ministers; that way, we were forced to buy Pacers in quantity (and some pretty rubbishy freight facilities grants ) . Of the dozen or so Secretaries of State and 40-50 junior Ministers with whom I worked, perhaps half a dozen were really very good at their work. One tended to judge them not on the detailed content of their polices (which were whatever they were) but on (a) their ability to present and defend those policies, and (b) their ability – QC-like – to master any brief on any new subject (“Events dear boy, events”…) . The first criterion doesn’t actually require enormous intellectual power but simply a knowledge of how to handle people (and Parliament in particular); the second requires sterner stuff! What was really difficult was a minister who had intellectual pretensions but who was, in fact, thick. It’s the old Prussian Army selection joke…
No names.
@answer=42 – traffic lights (and speed limits and much else) were an infringement of the liberty of the motorist to drive as he wished to exercise his own judgement about what might be safe, apparently. On a bad day, driving on the left was another target. Even my highways colleagues were shocked. Quite what Ridley would have made of the selfdriving car, is difficult to say.
Ha ha…..maybe he was really an Anarchist at heart ?. Did he forget that even that bastion of individual liberty- the United States- has some fairly stringent traffic laws?
GH: Presumably Ridley would have approved of every private legal action launched against the motorist when a pedestrian or other road user was disadvantaged by said motorist.
@John Bull’s dog -I doubt if he thought that far; B?+ for consistency and logic
@Anonymously
Seeing Red, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs quite recently will give you a flavour of that particular loathing for traffic signals. It almost makes sense – in a parallel universe of which we know little.
@ Briantist etc
The construction of the ramp at Bow, allowing the DLR to transition between the Poplar-Bow-Hackney alignment and the Limehouse – Pudding Mill Lane – Stratford formation, effectively severed the alignment beyond Bow towards Hackney. The DLR could have gone to Hackney, or to Stratford. But it couldn’t do both. (at least, not without massive flying junctions taking up space which was simply not available)
That sounds terribly reminiscent of the LBSCR’s response to the Clayton Tunnel disaster of 1861 — they thought railways were much safer without all those signals distracting the drivers.
@Graham H: we didn’t do re-openings in the ’80s, alas
For clarification, “we” here is the Department of Transport? The GLC did reopenings in the 80s (the “Cross London Link”), but as you mention was into oblivion by Thatcherism in the course of the decade.
@timbeau: The DLR could have gone to Hackney, or to Stratford. But it couldn’t do both
As I understand it Stratford as a destination was a fairly late choice, with the initial concept being for the north-south DLR line to go to Mile End via a stretch of street running along the Mile End Road. Depending on the design this might also have severed the route northwards. Obviously once an automated third-rail system was chosen this became impossible.
The shift from Mile End to Stratford perhaps meant that the DLR’s north-south line became more of a connector between the Isle of Dogs and the wider Southeast (via the BR connections at Stratford), and less focused on transporting people living in inner east London to the Isle of Dogs, which maybe had implications for the types of employer who would be attracted to the Canary Wharf area.
@Ian J — yes,”we” were DTp and BR. Re-openings snagged on both the finances of the PSO (there wasn’t any more money) and on a narrow legal interpretation of the application of the relevant EC legislation, which envisaged – so the lawyers said – a reducing PSO commitment in scope. Time has shown the latter to be a mistaken view but it coloured the underlying arrangements for the Spellar Act, which assumed that an experimental re-opening would either fail after the trial period or be absorbed into an increased PSO scope *because the case was strong in economic or financial terms*
@Ian J (04:31):
The putative Mile End route didn’t touch the old railway alignment. It appeared in an internal London Transport report (Docklands Rail Study of September 1981) as one of two suggested options to provide a fixed link into the Isle of Dogs. Optimistic predictions for planning purposes were I think in the region of 1000-1200 passengers per peak hour and direction. The other route was suggested as running west, much as the initial DLR did. Depending on the terminating arrangements, this could have been a tramway or some form of automated people-mover (technology unspecified). There were various options on the Isle of Dogs which might have applied to either route. The routes out of the Isle of Dogs were alternatives -building both west and north came much later. There was certainly some discussion about the different traffics that the alternative routes might serve.
The Mile End route was a street running tramway from the Isle of Dogs to Mile End Underground station. The concept included a final single track bidirectional (segregated from other traffic of course) gutter-running section along the Mile End Road, reached by an alignment up Burdett Road. This had right-hand running with the northbound track in the carriageway and the southbound largely along the edge of Mile End Park. Whether the concept could have been actually implemented is another matter. It did not therefore use the Poplar-Victoria Park Junction railway alignment at all.
There was a sociologist (Simmel possibly?) who, in the early days of motor traffic, observed that traffic lights undermined social cohesion because good manners, such as voluntarily and willingly giving way to others, was being replaced by the imposition of instructions to proceed or stop. The thin end of the wedge …
Anonymously says “The Palace Gates branch wasn’t a huge loss”.
Arguably so. But in that case, it seems a little odd that Crossrail 2 is planning to re-instate it (underground). Incidentally, there were through trains to Liverpool Street (at least in peak hours) during parts of its history. But as you could get (faster) from Wood Green to Broad Street (among many other possibilities) the light use was understandable.
However, we digress a bit from the Fleet here….
@ Malcolm – if the P Gates route was so poor then I’m bemused by the fact that local bus routes which parallel it today are so frequent and so heavily used. As ever with the benefit of hindsight and today’s view on running urban rail services we have thrown away a number of potentially very useful old rail links that would be very beneficial in today’s world. I agree with your CR2 remark too.
@RNHJ
The Burdett Road/Mile End Road junction is a few yards west of Mile End station. But this New scientist Article from 1982 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4xhJY6ZtyO4C&pg=PA729&lpg=PA729&dq=mile+end+street+running+docklands&source=bl&ots=JvQft3GeTo&sig=hch04jQx_PB-shiLDtg1iljS9GU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiR1da754HOAhWB1BoKHTMBD7QQ6AEIPzAG#v=onepage&q=mile%20end%20street%20running%20docklands&f=false
has a diagram showing the preferred DLR alignment running EAST from Mile End station. The article mentions the use of street running along Mile End Road and Bow Road for 1km – which is almost exactly the distance between Mile End station and the point where Bow Road crosses the old NLR cutting.
@RNHJ
my previous does not, of course, imply that the your Burdett Road alignment may have been considered at some stage, as well as the Bow Road route discussed above by Ian J and me.
Sorry, correction
“the existence of the Bow Road route proposal discussed above by Ian J and me does not, of course, mean that your Burdett Road alignment may not also have been considered at some stage”
@WW – I doubt if the Palace Gates line ever offered serious competition to road-based transport. Even in 1938, the service was less than hourly with a “late” evening journey as late as 21.00. (Raises the interesting question as to why it was built in the first place but I am conscious of the forces of pent-up historiocrayonism poised to tell us more about this…)
@ Malcolm/WW “The Palace Gates branch was not a huge loss” because it was duplicated by better services to places people actually wanted to go, such as the Piccadilly Line to the West End, and the GN line to the City (via Kings Cross and the Widened Lines) Against that, a desultory service to the East End and North Woolwich was not going to compete, even with connections to Liverpool Street available at Seven Sisters (electrified in 1960).
The heavy bus usage in the area is partly as a result of Wood Green Shopping Centre -which could not exist if Noel Park station still occupied the site! Moreover, buses and trains are not interchangeable – buses provide local links within an area, with stops every few hundred yards, trains provide longer distance connections to and from the area. (Likewise, Gatwick Airport didn’t make the Brighton Main Line redundant!)
(This alleged interchangeability is the same fallacy that suggests that Crossrail will reduce demand for buses in Oxford Street: buses have continued to ply Oxford Street despite the presence of the Central Line since the end of the nineteenth century)
@timbeau: Thanks for the elaboration… I had taken the wrong meaning for “could”, I had taken it in its future tense, as opposed to the past tense. So I had expected there to be another link somwhere! The re-opening of the link to Queens Road Peckham was something that was pretty blindingly obvious to me as an easy way to expand the ELL, its previous existence was obvious even from looking at an A-Z…
@SHLR
It wasn’t the ELL bit to Queens Road Peckham that was difficult – though far from easy as it affected open space in a heavily built up area. The key issue was where do you choose to terminate/turn round the ELL service, and its impacts on the Southern network operations and revenues (tracks through Peckham were busier then than this month…).
NSE disliked any LU trains invading their territory, and preferred any LU incursion to terminate at East Dulwich then reverse towards Docklands. This limited extension achieved a lousy business case, so the first ELLX TWO application was only for the Northern Extension…
It was only with Railtrack in charge of the infrastructure – at last a bit of praise for them – that someone was willing to realise that the value of marginal unused track slots via Peckham was worth striving for, providing trains went on to centres other than just Peckham. It helped that by then LUL had accepted that the ELL Southern Extension would probably be to a national rail specification.
This led to a large volume of extension optioneering – but not to be elaborated in this post. Headlines of the ELLSX history are set out here: http://www.jrc.org.uk/PDFs/ELLG-An-Enduring-Legacy-final.pdf
@Graham H
“Raises the interesting question as to why it was built in the first place ”
Briefly, the GER wanted a slice of the tripper traffic to Alexandra Palace.
The line lasted nine years longer than either the GNR’s Alexandra Palace branch or the LCDR’s Crystal Palace branch, both built for similar reasons, and both closed in 1954.
@timbeau 11:35
A most interesting article. I’ve been dredging my memory and not come up with anything much. I was the joint originator of the original Burdett Road route to Mile End in the 1981 report and remained on the project team through that period. I think that approaching Mile End from the east, avoiding street running by using the Poplar-Victoria Park alignment must have been discussed in principle. It would however clearly have been both difficult and expensive to avoid street running and easily superseded by the Stratford option when BR agreed to hand over the southernmost single track along the Great Eastern main line alignment. This would also probably account for the northern route being in a later Parliamentary bill to the western route.
@GH
The 1938 Palace Gates Service was some six years after the Piccadilly Line opened to Turnpike Lane and Wood Green.
@timbeau
Wood Green was a major shopping and entertainment destination in the days of the 29 tram. and its trolleybus successors.
The GER service never had a hope.
@timbeau
The GNR Northern Heights branch was almost subsumed into the Northern Line. It was finally rendered uneconomic by the Green Belt.
I dread to think how the Northern Line would be coping today if the Northern Heights scheme had been completed.
This article is about the Fleet line. Places much further north such as Palace Gates and Alexandra Palace were only mentioned as comparitors to the lost Old Ford. Further digressions around what did happen, might have happened, and/or might yet happen in and around the London Borough of Haringey and its immediate neighbours may be removed without warning.
@Jonathan Roberts: I hadn’t realised the ELL project had been going on for so long. I thought it was all a post 1997 projecct. Thanks!
@SH…Oh yes. It had been in the news on and off in my part of London since the early 1990s
@Nameless….Actually, the truth is rather more complicated than that. But until JR writes his long awaited Northern Heights article (hint, hint ?), then I guess we’ll have to refrain from discussing this further until then.
There are some excellent photos and more detail on the design of Bush Lane House, as well as the current use of the space designed for the Fleet Line station’s ticket concourse.
Bush _Lane_ House, rather than Bush House (which has a somewhat different history!) :-p
[Thanks, corrected!. LBM]
Thanks for mentioning my post on 80 Cannon Street! I have included a few more links and two new pictures for extra interest.
Graham H 19 July 2016 at 17:30
” I do not think Ridley liked being in Transport at all; his stint at the Treasury was much more to his taste. For a radical libertarian as he was, Transport technology imposed too many constraints (You wouldn’t have liked his diatribe against traffic lights…) ”
Traffic Lights are an excellent microcosm of the rule of law.
Graham H 19 July 2016 at 17:30
Are you going to write memoirs?
You could always take the David Hume view about publication.
@Alan Griffiths – you’ll have to remind me about David Hume. (Actually, if I had the time and will power, the book I intended to write was about baroque architecture in eastern Europe, but …)