The Swanley interchange is the spiral gate where South London lowlifes go head-to-head with drug barons and currency dealers. But, just now, according to the Evening Standard bulletin boards, the motorway, like the country paths of the Green Loop, is verboten. OFFICIAL: STAY OFF THE M25 IN RUSH HOUR.
This is too bizarre. It’s been rumoured for some time that New Labour want to downgrade (re-evaluate) the M25, turn it into the equivalent of a defeated candidate for Mayor of London or Mo Mowlam. Leakages have been hissing for months, penalties for single-occupant vehicles, but this announcement is still a surprise. A motorway, built to solve the problems of flow and congestion, has now become the problem. Success has killed it. The M25 is too popular, people use it indiscriminately: thieves on away days, touring the bosky suburbs; sexual service industries taking advantage of the excellent parking facilities and discreet greenery of the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Wisley; walkers, random inner-city strollers trying to define the point where London abdicates.
So let’s celebrate the first non-motoring motorway, the ‘girdle’ imagined by altruistic planners in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. The road is tired, it can’t take the stress of traffic; 170,000 vehicles a day going nowhere, wearing away the tarmac mantle. The solution is obvious: steer clear of the road at times when the road is most needed. Without traffic, the M25 is a marvel, a delight to the senses. Leaflets have been printed for distribution to travellers at service stations, channel ports and airports: KEEP OFF. Detour around the road that takes you around London. The Highways Agency understands that future autobahns will be virtual rather than actual. In time, the clapped-out circuit will be covered with Barratt homes, Fairview Estates, Laing’s flagpoles; 120 miles of housing stock, pedestrianised.
Once the M25 was redefined as a special-needs case, a privileged unfortunate soon to be granted heritage status, it was time to deal with contiguous countryside. The road that was no longer a road was sandwiched by fields that were no longer fields (golf courses, boarding kennels, pig sheds, reinvented woodland). The next step was obvious: downsize the green belt, slip the corset. Brownfield was the preferred option, trashed land nobody had any use for, armament factories, bone yards, gas works, could be computer-swiped into paradise pastures.
The first intimations that green belt was no longer acceptable in think-tank circles came when books started to appear promoting ‘blue sky’ fantasies. What is said is always the opposite of what is to be done. I was nervous when I read Bob Gilbert’s The Green London Way, an eco-excursionist book put out by those decent old leftists Lawrence and Wishart. Hand-drawn maps of a new London dreaming; anecdotes, small histories. The London Loop by David Sharp continued the process of opening up the suburbs, linking patches of woodland, riverside paths, tracks across chalk and greensand. These men saw London in its entirety, as a fortunate mixture of town and country, speculative development and eccentric vision, follies, palaces, water towers, footpaths that had been walked for generations. They respected the geography, the pattern of rivers and hills. Their conclusions were based on experience. They had been out there with their notebooks and cameras. They had done it.
In December 1999 the Cabinet Office issued a consultation paper, the green belt had created an undesirable ‘moat effect’. A moat or ditch or ha-ha to keep out, as architect Nicholas Hawksmoor wrote of the denizens of Whitechapel, ‘filth Nastyness & Brutes’. The document was, in effect, an early warning on behalf of the developers, the mall conceptualists, the rewrite industry. Government “was pure Hollywood: hype, the airbrushing of bad history; dodgy investors, a decent wedge in disgrace or retirement. A pay-off culture of bagmen and straightfaced explainers.
‘Special protection for the best agricultural land would be removed, while farmers would be encouraged to launch new kinds of businesses.’ What businesses? Barbecue pits? Landfill? Ski slopes (of carcasses) to rival Beckton? There must, said the report, be ‘a general presumption in favour of market forces’. A sweeping away of fussy restrictions. ‘A planning system more supportive of an enterprising countryside.’ The only way the countryside could become enterprising was to cease to be countryside: to become ‘off-highway’, a retail resort (like Bluewater), a weekend excursion that depended on a road that we were being advised to avoid. Tony Blair’s ‘Performance and Innovation Unit’ (a thirteen-strong team of academics and civil servants, ‘overseen’ by Andrew Smith, Chief Secretary to the Treasury) made the dissolution of the green belt a major element in an attempt at joined-up’ government.
Metropolitans need this green fantasy, the forest on the horizon, the fields and farms that represent a picture book vision of a pre-Industrial Revolution past. We need the illusion of sap in the vein. We hanker after market gardens, allotments bedded out with the latest horticultural novelties. The M25 is tolerable because it moves through an extended parkland (Epping Forest, the Thames Crossing, North Downs). The green belt, futile as it is, turns London into one of Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities. Howard’s vision, originally published in 1898 as Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, imagined a Utopian community, public buildings at the centre, surrounded by parks, houses with gardens, set within ‘an agricultural reservation’. Such reservations, check out Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City, don’t really work. It’s too swift an enactment of something that needs to evolve, through compromise and bodge, through centuries. Lay it out overnight and you get a Mormon dormitory or an unoccupied cemetery that looks great in the catalogue.
But the green belt is on a grander scale, conceived in desperation. G.L. Pepler’s ‘Greater London’ (published in the RIB A Town Planning Conference — Transactions, 1911) proposed a parkway encircling London at a ten-mile radius from Charing Cross (from the monument that marked the last stage of the funeral procession of Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I). The parkway would act as a ring road and as the basis for a necklace of garden suburbs.
Arthur Crow, also writing in 1911, went further; he wanted to connect ten ‘Cities of Health’ (Barnet, Bromley, Croydon, Dartford, Epping, Epsom, Romford, Uxbridge, Waltham, Watford). They would be joined by a ‘Great Ring Avenue’, a fantastic Egyptian or Mayan conceit, radiant settlements as outstations to a centre given over to public buildings, places of ceremony, commerce and worship. The avenue would be 500 feet wide and eighty-eight miles in circumference.
By the time Londoners had seen their city bombed, riverside industries destroyed, they were ready to think of renewal, deportation to the end of the railway line, the jagged beginnings of farmland. Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan 1944 (published in 1945) still worked through concentric bands: the Inner Urban Ring (overcrowded, fire-damaged), the Suburban Ring (to which inner-city casualties would migrate), the green belt (ten miles beyond the edge of London), and the Outer Country Ring, which would extend to the boundary of the regional plan.