Sally JefferyThe Box – a 1960s urban horror story
"Even when the route was first sketched out, knowledge of it remained confined to the roads department. The first the LCC’s municipal architects heard about it was when they unveiled plans for a housing estate in Clapham Junction, south London, and had to be quietly taken aside and told that one part might need to be moved so it did not sit in the middle of an eight-lane highway."
London’s lost mega-motorway: the eight-lane ring road that would have destroyed much of the city
In the car-crazed 1960s, planners came up with a scheme to slash through the capital’s inner suburbs with huge freeways. Only fragments were ever built – but they tell of a fate narrowly avoided