Fifty years ago, the Greater London Council was working on an ambitious new plan for London. It involved flattening Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus and much of the West End, as well as Islington and Kensington, and driving motorways through those districts.
That seems incredible now: if a city’s most architecturally interesting neighbourhoods were to be destroyed, where would everyone be driving to anyway?
The point, of course, was not the destination but the car. In the postwar period, cities across the world were being redesigned not for people but for automobiles. Even if little of the scheme finally materialised, it was a bizarre interlude from which, astonishingly, we haven’t entirely recovered.
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