Snap Plom for Vigour
PICCADILLY CIRCUS
By TERENCE BENDIXSON
ARECTANGULAR mushroom with 95,000 vehicles swirling underneath every day and people strolling on top. This is what Lord Holford, the architect-planner, and Ove Arup, the structural engineer, propose for Piccadilly Circus. The miichroom will be on the east side where the London Pavilion now stands; its triangular Stem will contain a traffic control post and escalators to carry passengers to and from an extension of the Underground concourse; at the level of the strolling platform will be the entrances to a 'ban- queting suite.' Eros will be moved over towards Swan and Edgar's not, as one might hope, to free him from his present isolation in a sea of petrol fumes but to give freer vein to the roaring vehicles. Then as now he and his seaweedy art nouveau fountain will be fenced in.
There are really only three things to say about this skilful attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. The first concerns the experience of being under the mushroom. Ove Arup can be relied upon to produce a structure that has elegance; but suffi- cient underground car parks, under-passes and the like already exist to indicate that the genre tends to have as much allure as a public lavatory. If the idea of encouraging 95,000 vehicles to pass the Circus every day is to be persisted with, some- thing better than the aesthetics of a main town drain will be needed.
This brings me to the second point, which is traffic. Lord Holford resigned his consultancy' with the London County Council once, when asked to cope with an inhuman tide of vehicles, but this time he has swallowed an increase of 60 . per cent over the flow six years ago as meekly as a Iamb. He even contemplates modifications to his initial layout—nice cosy little details like the widening of Wardour and Whitcomb Streets which the Greater London Council haS up its sleeve—that would permit a 70 per cent increase.
Just try crossing Piccadilly from Burlington House to Fortnums, and then roll the prospect of half as many vehicles again around your mind; (That is a not quite true comparison because some of the post-1960 growth is already there.) Go through the same mental motions over Regent Street or Shaftesbury Avenue and every othe'r main street in the West End. Then consider that the need to cater for this increase was pro- posed by a small body of engineers, the Adams committee, in 1962 and that everyone has swal- lowed its recommendation hook, line and sinker ever since. Yet if ever there was a small body of blinkered men it was those engineers from the Ministry of Transport, the London County Coun- cil and the Road Research Laboratory.
Focusing their jaded attention on Los Angeles, they reached towards what they saw as the ideal, a city in which everyone could drive everywhere. But because London is old and tight packed and the buildings costly, they had to fall back on the pathetic palliative of demanding just slightly wider streets. Such a solution might enable a minimally bigger minority than at present to drive where it wants, but it would do nothing to eliminate the jams in which minority and majority alike would sit and wait. It is a policy to which we are still committed and against which Lord Holford does not raise one little finger.
This brings me to the third point, best intro- duced by the slogan 'SNAP PLOM FOR vIcoutt'—a fictitious advertisement displayed on the first photographs of the late Jack Cotton's proposed building for the Monico site. The significance of the slogan lies not in 'PLOW but in its date, for 1959 marks a mid-point in the thirteen-year saga of Piccadilly Circus. It was the year that Bernard Levin called Cotton's building 'a monster in Piccadilly' in the SPECTATOR, and in which a matter that had been the subject of disreputable negotiations between Cotton and the LCC since 1953 was first brought into the open. Not that anything was then built at Piccadilly Circus. Not that anything has been built since. As Sherlock Holmes once said—the curious thing about the dog in the night was that it did not bark. This was a useful observation about Anglo-Saxon political thought, since it recognised that the appropriate inaction can be just as significant as the appropriate action. The failure to do any- thing at Piccadilly Circus should not therefore be criticised. It is an exhibition of a technique for passing through a • period daring which any action would certainly be mistaken. _ It may therefore be appropriate to see how this national twiddling ' of thumbs was engineered. Before the 1959 outer)/ and the public inquiry presided over by Colin Buchanan, two big things had happened. Cotton had bought his £500,000 slice of the Monico site (the LCC owned another bit), and the LCC architects had failed to win acceptance for a plan for rebuilding much of the Circus with upper-level, Barbican-style walk- ways.
Then came the 'SNAP PLOW pictures, the inquiry and Mr Henry Brooke's unexpected rejection of the Cotton building on the grounds that it was bad architecture. A Minister of Housing had never done this before.
Holford was next commissioned, and per- suaded the Ministry of Transport against its will to accept only a 20 per cent growth in traffic capacity. The result was a 1961 plan that the London evening papers called `Piazzadilly! There was space on the ground for Eros and visitors, but bridges as well to get people over the busy. streets. This plan was worked out in detall with the various interested parties and a final, compromised version submitted to the LCC in 1962. Now it was the turn of the traffic engineers to strike back. The Adams committee torpedoed Piazzadilly withinjhe corridors of power. In 1963 the Ministers of Transport and Housing issued a statement saying its traffic capacity was in- adequate, and Holford resigned. In 1964, trying to salvage something. Sir Keith Joseph set up a working party to look into the whole question again. This uncritically accepted the Adams traffic estimate but reinstated the idea of a pedestrian deck and high walks into Soho as a means of lifting people above the murderous traffic. The working party's report come out in 1965, and pro- vided a new brief that enabled the Greater Lon- don and Westminster City Councils to persuade Holford to take up the cudgels once more.
In the meantime City Centre Properties had re-let the Monico on leases running to 1971, which gives a guide as to when reconstruction may take place. A similar timescale for redevelop- ment was envisaged by the working party. Work on Holford's mushroom might start sooner, ex- cept that Holford himself in his report last week advocated a tie-up between redevelopment of the London Pavilion and Monico sites.
It looks, then, as if the next five years, like the last thirteen, will have to be filled with busy in- activity. It is going to take a lot to shift the-Minis- try of Transport and the GLC from their inane obsession with jamming nearly a hundred thou- sand vehicles through the eye of the Piacadilly needle every day. Fortunately Ford, Vauxhall and BMC are doing their utmost to create day-, long jams of a severity that will force the Govern- ment to make decisions. Even so, every scrap of delay that can be managed is worth struggling for.
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