North Cross Route: General Report (1966)
| Date | 1966 |
| Owned by | Chris5156 |
| Type | Publications (see all artefacts) |
|
This file is truly delightful. It is likely to bring a smile to your face, probably because it contains the sort of thing that makes trawling through dusty archive documents worthwhile. The thing in this file that makes your day might actually have nothing to do with its subject matter. |
Context
In the early 60s, the London County Council began handing out parts of its very roughly sketched urban motorway plan to firms of consulting engineers, who would then turn the ideas into workable motorway schemes. The North Cross Route was handed to Travers Morgan, who reported back in 1966. They produced two final documents. One, the Engineering Report, with all the detailed plans for the motorway, is available at the National Archives (below). The other was the General Report, which describes the work they conducted to find a suitable alignment, the modifications they made to the LCC's original idea, the engineering measures necessary to build each route, and so on, concluding with a recommendation for their preferred route - which is what the Engineering Report went on to describe.
This report, a landscape A3-sized book stuffed with colour artists' impressions and detailed plans of the many ideas it describes, is therefore a fantastically detailed explanation of how the North Cross Route evolved from an idea sketched on a map in pencil to a fully formed motorway scheme, and why it was designed the way it was.
So far this report has not turned up in any archive facilities, so for the time being it is only available to view in Chris5156's living room.
- MT 106/437 GLC: North Cross route and Eastern Avenue extension; consideration of proposed major road network for North Central London; includes consultants' reports (5 parts) (1967-1972)
