LONDON OF TOMORROW

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 16, 14 October 1942, Page 5

LONDON OF TOMORROW

Reconstruction Of City Envisaged

GREAT CIRCULAR ROAD

(British Official Wireless.) • RUGBY, October 12.

A wonder city of -broad, airy streets, parks, squares and open spaces, a city of colonnades, crescents and noble vistas, a city fit for civilized people to li ve i n —that is the London of tomorrow as envisaged by the Royal Academy planning committee established in January, 1940, to plan a scheme for architectural redevelopment in the metropolis. The series of plans it has drawn up are now on exhibition at Burlington House. They are intended to stimulate the imagination of those who will be responsible for reconstruction after the war, rather than to lay down any fixed solution now. The committee worked on tlie basis of the BresseyLutyens report in 1937 for dealing with London’s traffic requirements. The leading feature of the plan produced is a ring-road connecting all the main line terminal stations. This circular route goes -by way of Paddington, Euston, Bishopsgate and Tower Bridge, crosses the Thames and returns by way of Waterloo and Victoria. London bridge station is moved south of the river, Waterloo is shifted to a new site on the south side of Vauxhall. Euston, St. Pancras and King’s Cross are telescoped into one station. Within this ring there are no surface railways, but the terminal stations are connected with a circular electric underground railway. * Drastic Changes. The area within the ring sees tho most drastic transformation under the committee’s plan. For instance, Covent Garden would be converted from an amalgam of music and cabbages in which the market jostles the Opera House into a civic art centre, with the Opera House, a concert hall, theatres and pleasure gardens complete with fountains, while the market would be banished to a more convenient site somewhere on the ring-road. The exhibition also pictures the Thames -with the Embankment gardens extended along either bank and the whole river frontage opened up from Putney to Tower Bridge. The conglomeration of buildings crowding ou the British Museum would be cleared, permitting a view of its graceful colonnade from New Oxford Street. Suggested redevelopment near Victoria Station would permit of the building of a processional way from Buckingham Palace to Victoria Station,-offer-ing unlimited opportunities for pageantry.