Archive for the ‘Transport’ Category

The River Thames has over 200 river crossings, comprising bridges, railway tunnels, service tunnels and one foot tunnel.

This isn’t really surprising as the Thames runs for over two hundred miles and threads through central London, but it’s the bridges and tunnels of central London that we will focus on.

Dartford Crossing

With one exception, the Dartford Crossing lies to the east of London and forms part of the M25 orbital motorway. The Dartford Crossing comprises two road tunnels (completed 1963 and 1980) and the ‘Queen Elizabeth II Bridge”  – the tallest of London’s bridges (completed 1991).

The bridge carries the M25 traffic north-south while two tunnel bores carry traffic south-north; there are toll charges for both the bridge and the tunnels, but these are reduced after 10pm each evening.

Around 150,000 vehicles use the Dartford crossing each day.

Tower Bridge

The easternmost, and most recognisable of London’s bridges is Tower Bridge, opened in 1894 with two towers, an elevated walkway that can be hired for private functions and the road deck that can be raised to allow shipping through. The bridge is still raised around a thousand times a year.

The area west of Tower Bridge as far as London Bridge was known as ‘the pool of London’ and the refurbished wharves on the south side of the river in this stretch are some indication of the extent of trade that was conducted here until the mid twentieth century.

London Bridge

London Bridge is the oldest of London’s bridges, and one of the newest. There has been a bridge at this site (or thereabouts) since around 55AD during the roman occupation of Britain; the current bridge was completed in 1973, its predecessor famously being transported to Lake Havasu City in Arizona.  

Medieval bridges on this site included houses and shops, and the narrow water flows caused the Thames to flow more slowly, this (along with unusually cold weather) is thought to have contributed to the Thames freezing over. The Thames actually froze on 26 occasions and famously in 1683 and 1814 when the ice was thick enough to hold ‘frost fairs’ on the frozen river.

The next river crossing is Cannon Street railway bridge,which carries rail passengers from Cannon Street to South London and Kent. The bridge was first opened in 1866. The next road/pedestrian crossing is Southwark Bridge.

Southwark Bridge

The present Southwark Bridge was completed in 1921, but its predecessor, completed in 1819 became famous through frequent references by Charles Dickens. The 1819 bridge was constructed from cast iron and as such was known as the ‘iron bridge’.

There is a frieze in a pedestrian subway on the south side of the bridge depicting the Frost Fairs mentioned previously.  

Millennium Bridge

As its name suggests, the ‘Millennium Bridge’ was constructed to celebrate the new millennium, it was opened in the year 2000 and quickly became known as ‘the wobbly bridge’. The large numbers of pedestrians caused a feedback/resonance and the bridge had to be closed for additional dampeners to be fitted. The resulting bridge is perhaps slightly less dramatic that the original design, but it’s very popular with tourists, providing a footbridge link between St Paul’s Cathedral and the City of London with the South Bank and the Tate Modern art gallery.

The Millennium Bridge features in the 2009 Harry Potter film – ‘Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince’.

The next crossing is Blackfriars Railway Bridge which carries railway traffic, closely followed by Blackfrairs Bridge.

Blackfriars Bridge

The current Blackfriars Bridge was completed in 1869 replacing an earlier (1769) structure. The name is taken from the Dominican Friars who moved their priory into the area on the nerth bank, close to Ludgate Hill in 1276.

Blackfriars Bridge is perhaps best known for being the place (again on the northern bank) where the body of the Italian banker Roberto Calvi was found hanged in 1982.

In a later article I will cover the next bridges west, from Hungerford Bridge to Albert Bridge.

Roundabouts are common throughout Europe and the UK, but almost inevitably we Brits have embraced them with more enthusiasm than most.

While most roundabouts are an intersection between four or more roads, we Brits have introduced ‘mini roundabouts’ at the intersection of only two roads in a bid to manage traffic flows.

The basic rules about approaching and navigating roundabouts are pretty straight forward, as we drive on the left we drive round roundabouts in a clockwise direction, always ‘giving way’ (yielding) to traffic already on the roundabout. There is often confusion about lane discipline, but they seem to work more often than they don’t.

In fact roundabouts work so well that there are a few places where the whole roundabout concept has been embraced with undue enthusiasm. The town of Swindon, in the south of England, is reported to have more roundabouts per head of population than any other town and a famous ‘magic roundabout’. This comprises five linked mini-roundabouts, so it’s possible to navigate the larger intersection in an anti-clockwise direction, but each mini-roundabout clockwise. Confusing. 

And the term ‘magic roundabout’ brings us to the other definition of ’roundabout’ – that’s what we Brits call carousels.

The English folf singer Ralph McTell wrote a song back in the seventies called “Streets of London” – but as I mentioned recently, while the City of London – the square mile that houses Britain’s main financial district – has ’streets’, ‘lanes’,'alleys’, ‘courts’ and ’squares’, there are no ‘roads’ within the City.

There are two rather charming suggestions as to why this should be:

one is that a road is ‘an open way for traveling between two places’, and with typical London arrogance, when you get to the City you’ve arrived 

the other suggests that all the streets in the City were named before the word ‘road’ came into common usage at the end of the sixteenth century (the use of the word is first recorded 1596) while ’street’ is derived from the original Roman ’strada’. Britain’s Roman roads were all ’streets’ – Ermine Street (which started at Bishopsgate and headed north), Watling Street and so on.

London’s ‘underground’ network stretches for a total of some 250 miles, from Heathrow Airport in the west to Upminster in the east, although more than half of the network, outside central London, is actually above ground.

The first ‘underground’ service ran between Paddington and Farringdon along what is now the top of the Circle Line. This was back in January 1863 and the trains were steam powered, consequently the service ran close to the surface and has frequent ‘vents’. The beautiful  brickwork on stations such as Great Portland Street is testament to the Victorians who built the route. Electric trains were introduced in 1890 allowing for longer enclosed journeys and so the network grew.

Many underground stations were used as air raid shelters during the second world war.

London’s soft clay soil means that tunnelling is less difficult than in many cities, and deeper tunnels are possible. The deepest line is the Northern Line, which runs at a depth of 220 feet below ground level (just outside Hampstead) and serves Angel Station, which is home to Britain’s longest escalator, nearly 200 feet long and rising some 90 feet to the surface.

The newest underground line is the Jubilee Line, the first part of which was opened by Her Majesty the Queen in 1977 (the year of her Silver Jubilee). The line has been extended in recent years to serve Greenwich and Stratford (the venue for the 2012 Olympic Games), and is one of the few services to run south of the River Thames.

London Underground carries some 4 million passengers each week day, and up to 3 million at weekends. Most passengers use the ‘Oyster Card’ to provide travel on buses, underground and the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), which was built in the eighties and nineties to serve the new financial centre in London’s old docklands. Both the DLR and the Jubilee Line serve the heart of ‘docklands’ -Canary Wharf.

Inevitably, over the years, stations have closed and there are a number of websites dedicated to ‘ghost’ stations (here) such as  Down Street on the Piccadilly Line and British Museum on the Central Line. If you look out of the train windows on the Central Line between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road stations you might observe a stretch with noticeably lighter walls, or where the tunnel wall drops away from the usual distance from the carriage – that is the old British Museum station.

Equally distinctive is London’s underground map. Harry Beck, an electrical engineer, designed the map, in its current form, in the 1930’s. His design, based on a circuit diagram was the first to make sense of the underground network by separating the network from its ‘real’ geography. Some early examples of Beck’s work can be seen in a case at St James’s Park station (the headquarters of the underground) and at London Transport’s museum at Covent Garden.

The map’s style has been copied by underground networks the world over and is truly iconic.

The M25 is London’s orbital motorway, circling Greater London with 117 miles of seemingly endless traffic.

The road ’starts’ to the east of London on the south bank of the River Thames, and there are some 31 junctions before the road returns to the north bank of the river. The actual river crossing comprises the Queen Elizabeth II bridge (southbound or clockwise) and the Dartford Tunnel (northbound or anti-clockwise).  The crossing is not a motorway, thus allowing a larger range of motor traffic to cross the river.  The crossing toll for a car is £1.50 each way.

Most of the M25 is three lanes in each direction, in common with other British motorways, but in places (such as approaching Heathrow Airport to the west of London) it can be six lanes in each direction.

The motorway is served by three service areas:

·         South Mimms – to the north of London adjacent to the junction with the A1 trunk road to the North

·         Thurrock – to the east of London at Junction 30

·         Clackett Lane – to the south east, between Junctions 5 and 6.

The M25 was completed in 1986 and ceremonially opened by Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister.

Traffic levels on the M25 are such that it is often referred to as Britain’s largest car park, and was the inspiration for Chris Rea’s hit single ‘The Road to Hell’ – “this ain’t no technological freeway, this is the road to hell”.

Despite this, it has been a tremendous success, generating traffic that would not have happened without the M25. For example -  a journey from my home in Essex to Heathrow Airport can take as little as ninety minutes using the M25 (a journey of some 78 miles) – the same journey avoiding the M25 could take over two hours, despite being twenty miles shorter. And the thought of trying it through central London is just too daunting to contemplate.