Urbanise motorways: reprioritise London's urban highways to create places.BACKGROUND The great east-west artery of Marylebone/Euston Road was originally constructed in the eighteenth century as a bypass called the New Road. Its function was to take traffic (particularly cattle movement) away from the centre of town, especially the other great east-west conduit of Oxford Street to the south. As with all roads All Roads is a 2001 interactive fiction game by Jon Ingold that placed first at the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition. It also won the XYZZY Awards for Best Game, Best Setting and Best Story and was nominated for Best Individual Puzzle and Best Writing. , it quickly became a placemaking catalyst. Along it, because of improved access, parishes, then villages, were founded. The four parish churches on the road--Paddington St Mary's, Marylebone, St Pancras St Pancras (or Saint Pancras) may refer to:
During the mid and late nineteenth century, the accessibility of Marylebone/Euston Road, coupled with the building of the Regent's Canal The Regent's Canal is a canal across an area just to the north of central London. It provides a link from the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal, just north-west of Paddington Basin, in the west, to the Limehouse Basin and the River Thames in east London. to the docks from the Grand Union Canal The Grand Union Canal in England is part of the British canal system. Its main line connects the two largest cities in England, London and Birmingham and stretches for 220 km (137 miles) and has 166 locks [1]. , made it the ideal place to build the new railways bringing first goods then passengers from the north of England. This created a great industrial zone running east-west along this strip of north London North London is a part of London, England which has several possible definitions. River & geography The part of London north of the River Thames (illustrated). . Between them were the polluted pol·lute tr.v. pol·lut·ed, pol·lut·ing, pol·lutes 1. To make unfit for or harmful to living things, especially by the addition of waste matter. See Synonyms at contaminate. 2. lands and workers' dwellings of one of the city's poorest communities. By the mid twentieth century, motorised Adj. 1. motorised - equipped with a motor or motors; "a motorized wheelchair" motored, motorized road traffic was perceived as a serious threat to urban planning urban planning: see city planning. urban planning Programs pursued as a means of improving the urban environment and achieving certain social and economic objectives. , and both the Abercrombie and Buchanan reports highlighted the need to address the greater efficiency of roads. In the early 1960s, Marylebone/Euston Road was declared a through road which changed its perceived nature from a series of places for local people to an efficient conduit of movement from outside the area from east to west and vice versa VICE VERSA. On the contrary; on opposite sides. . Fifty years later, the designation of Marylebone/Euston Road as a 'Through Road' sits extremely uncomfortably, not to say detrimentally, with all the places and functions along its length. Clearly the best located street in London, it now contains corporate headquarters, hospital buildings, the British Library British Library, national library of Great Britain, located in London. Long a part of the British Museum, the library collection originated in 1753 when the government purchased the Harleian Library, the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, and groups of manuscripts. , tourist attractions, housing and shops, yet because of traffic planning, it is still not an especially pleasant or civic place. Pedestrian movement is corralled and dictated by the paraphernalia of the '60s traffic engineer--railings, underpasses, restricted movement and so on. All this highlights the imbalance of how the road is shared, exacerbated by the fact that annually, ten times more people (in excess of 300 million) move on foot from transport interchanges to places of work compared with those making similar journeys by car (35 million). PROPOSITION In the absence of any unifying planning scheme and with a host of different agencies spread between three separate London boroughs, no one body has seemed willing to attempt to resolve the traffic/pedestrian conflict. This voluntary project began by addressing these issues and has grown in support to become accepted by the planning and traffic agencies along the route as a viable basis for a series of masterplans. It encompasses an overall strategy of parallel routes for pedestrians and cyclists, backed up by an approach to landscaping, railings and crossings, which are to be re-prioritised, together with street lighting, furniture, trees and so on. But the most successful aspect of the approach has been to conceive of Verb 1. conceive of - form a mental image of something that is not present or that is not the case; "Can you conceive of him as the president?" envisage, ideate, imagine it (as with the practice's work in Edinburgh) as a series of linked, linear projects, each one a bite-sized piece of urban design. In reality this is a placemaking approach which addresses key nodal points. Studies and improvement proposals range from west to east, from Paddington Basin Paddington Basin is an area of London at Paddington named after the nearby canal basin. The junction of the Regent's Canal and the Grand Junction Canal is close to this point but the basin itself is the terminus of the Paddington Arm of the Grand Junction Canal. to Edgware Road and Baker Street, right through to King's Cross St Pancras. Along the route are two schools of architecture and planning, Westminster and University College, and over the years students and teachers have explored, with great success, how they can contribute to the overall project in a constructive way. 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