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Kings Cross to Maplin/Stansted 1970s airport link proposals

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swt_passenger

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AlbertBeale said:
What route was thought up for getting from KX out to Southend? There's no obvious connection I can think of, and surely they wouldn't have been thinking of tunnelling under half of London from the KX area back in those days??
Potentially getting very off topic for the current Kings Cross layout changes thread now.

AIUI the route was to be from a new dedicated Kings Cross airport station on the goods yards north of the canal roughly where the recent major developments are, with the route passing over the 4 track approach to Kings Cross and then using the eastern bore of Copenhagen tunnel only, up towards Finsbury Park (actually Harringay), then heading east somehow (with a new curve joining the T&H (Goblin)). So not using the eastern bore of Gasworks tunnel as was being discussed in the main thread.

Previous discussions on the subject suggest it was all crayons, and a practical route out to the east was never really confirmed.

Also, given the dates mentioned below, the 3rd airport had been cancelled by 1970, so so by 1977 presumably the requirement to leave the eastern bore empty must have been overtaken by events. So i think it asks the question, how long had the 1970s throat changes been in development by the time they were done?

Modern Railways did a comprehensive article in October 1977, I’ve pulled out the relevant section from a scan of the whole article. Hope it is of some interest:
E5041FF7-37F3-44DF-A49F-406743180E40.jpeg
 
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Taunton

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Previous discussions on the subject suggest it was all crayons, and a practical route out to the east was never really confirmed.
I believe that is so. There was a further proposal to have the terminal at Victoria. The Stansted residents, opposing the airport vigorously (didn't work out in the end, did it?) chartered a train from Stansted station to Victoria one Sunday to show how long that would take, which got a lot of publicity, BBC national news, etc. I think they took well over two hours. Supplied by the Southern Region, Class 33 plus 4-TC. Ran, I guess, through Gospel Oak and Kensington Olympia.
 

Ianno87

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There's an abandoned curve between the Tottenham and Hampstead and present-day West Anglia Main Line between present day South Tottenham and Tottenham Hale stations; the Stansted link would presumably have made use of that.

The link is traceable on Google Aerial Views: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5828045,-0.0666857,1301m/data=!3m1!1e3

Basically, the present day connection to Tottenham South Jn (towards Stratford) also had a corresponding northbound curve towards Tottenham Hale.

A similar connection was also floated to get Thameslink services to Stansted Airport in some of the early ideas for Thameslink
 

MP33

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I can remember a booklet being delivered to the house with maps showing around six options of transport links to the Airport. Householders were asked to return a slip with their preferences, which would be one that was not a Rail line or Motorway going through the house.

One of the reasons for the project being abandoned is in the book The Goodies File. In it Bill Oddie is giving advice about birdwatching. His advice as to the best place to go, was to find out where the Government is planning to build an airport and go there quick.
 

Gloster

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Even I, who had no interest in civil aviation, Essex mudflats or birds (of either type as at the time I was just into my teens) can remember the discussions about trying to keep the airport clear of birds.
 

AlbertBeale

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Potentially getting very off topic for the current Kings Cross layout changes thread now.

AIUI the route was to be from a new dedicated Kings Cross airport station on the goods yards north of the canal roughly where the recent major developments are, with the route passing over the 4 track approach to Kings Cross and then using the eastern bore of Copenhagen tunnel only, up towards Finsbury Park (actually Harringay), then heading east somehow (with a new curve joining the T&H (Goblin)). So not using the eastern bore of Gasworks tunnel as was being discussed in the main thread.

Previous discussions on the subject suggest it was all crayons, and a practical route out to the east was never really confirmed.

Also, given the dates mentioned below, the 3rd airport had been cancelled by 1970, so so by 1977 presumably the requirement to leave the eastern bore empty must have been overtaken by events. So i think it asks the question, how long had the 1970s throat changes been in development by the time they were done?

Modern Railways did a comprehensive article in October 1977, I’ve pulled out the relevant section from a scan of the whole article. Hope it is of some interest:
View attachment 92113


Blimey - a link from the GOBLIN onto the KX route at Harringay would surely have meant a lot of demolition!
 

Bald Rick

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Blimey - a link from the GOBLIN onto the KX route at Harringay would surely have meant a lot of demolition!

Not that much, maybe a few dozen properties. This was proposed around the same time as Westway was being built and the London Motorway box was under consideration, including extending the M1 down to Finchley Road. Significant demolition of residential property (thousands in these cases) was an accepted part of building new infrastructure in London and other big cities.
 

swt_passenger

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Unless it was tunnelled from somewhere in the Belle Isle area.
Do you mean from the Holloway area? If a completely new tunnel from Belle Isle had been meant, surely it wouldn’t be described as using Copenhagen eastern bore?
 

Dave W

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A south to east curve between Finsbury Park and Harringay wouldn't have been *that* destructive - especially, as Bald Rick intimates, for that era when pretty much *any* building was in play for being flattened. It could have followed the same curve as Endymion Road (on a slightly wider radius!!!) as it traces the edge of the park and, with a bit of work, would have slid under Wightman Road (the new bridge built to accommodate the Goblin wires has quite the hump itself). I suspect Lothair Road South (actually more west of the New River, with it's "North" counterpart to the east) would bite the dust, as would the houses in the quadrant of Endymion and Wightman. I fancy Coningsby Road might survive with the little stub of Lothair Rd S. Then you'd build a nice contemporary block of concrete in the leftover gap between Wightman and Coningsby Road.

In terms of the railway, two major constraints stick out - one is the proximity of the New River, although the Goblin bridges that on a simple structure. The more pressing issue is how you'd split up services at Finsbury Park - presumably these lines would end up east of the extant railway, use the platform 1/2 island (when did this initially fall out of use? Its reinstatement was certainly in my time in London so post 2012), and then peel off south of Harringay (even in this state, this would probably still require some curtailment of the south headshunts of Hornsey Depot - what would that have been at the time?)
 

AlbertBeale

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Not that much, maybe a few dozen properties. This was proposed around the same time as Westway was being built and the London Motorway box was under consideration, including extending the M1 down to Finchley Road. Significant demolition of residential property (thousands in these cases) was an accepted part of building new infrastructure in London and other big cities.

Well - not so "accepted", which is why the various motorway rings and boxes were opposed and (in many cases) not built.
 

Bald Rick

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Well - not so "accepted", which is why the various motorway rings and boxes were opposed and (in many cases) not built.

Perhaps ‘more acceptable’ would be a better phrase. Westway and the East Cross route were pretty destructive.
 

ChiefPlanner

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Perhaps ‘more acceptable’ would be a better phrase. Westway and the East Cross route were pretty destructive.

The construction of just the first start of the Motorway Box (The westway) sliced through "not-very-nice-at the time" Ladbroke Grove and created a huge reaction such that the GLC lost the election , and the major scheme was canned - it would have (if built) ripped through Streatham and Wandsworth , trashed the Kensington Olympia area and so on. Planning ideas of the time - summed up by my external MA examiner , Prof Peter Hall - in 1965 considered ripping through Bloomsbury and Camden ("Outdated areas") to be neccesary. Much later in life he became an advocate for massively improved public transport of the likes of Crossrail.

All this was outwith the massive demolitions of housing in inner London , some of it being for redevelopment of sub standard housing. Must have been a grim time to live in some parts of London. (let alone other cities)
 

AlbertBeale

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The construction of just the first start of the Motorway Box (The westway) sliced through "not-very-nice-at the time" Ladbroke Grove and created a huge reaction such that the GLC lost the election , and the major scheme was canned - it would have (if built) ripped through Streatham and Wandsworth , trashed the Kensington Olympia area and so on. Planning ideas of the time - summed up by my external MA examiner , Prof Peter Hall - in 1965 considered ripping through Bloomsbury and Camden ("Outdated areas") to be neccesary. Much later in life he became an advocate for massively improved public transport of the likes of Crossrail.

All this was outwith the massive demolitions of housing in inner London , some of it being for redevelopment of sub standard housing. Must have been a grim time to live in some parts of London. (let alone other cities)

Threats to Bloomsbury in the 1960s weren't only road-related. After the British Library became a separate institution from the British Museum, but was still [to the extent there was room!] based at the BM, the original idea of how to give the BL its own space and bring most of its collections together was to knock down the 7 acres immediately to the south of the BM (everything except for the historic Hawksmoor church) - ie the historic heart of the district, still known today as Bloomsbury Village. But since about a thousand fairly ordinary people - including long-time residents - lived there, and many of them rose up to resist the plan, the scheme was dropped in the early '70s and land allocated up at St Pancras instead. [Declaration of interest - I live in one of the blocks that would have been razed for the bookstacks, having moved in shortly after the battle was won.]
 

edwin_m

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Well - not so "accepted", which is why the various motorway rings and boxes were opposed and (in many cases) not built.
I think the point is that the planners would have thought they could get away with a large amount of demolition, but once it had been done a couple of times and people saw the results on (or above) the ground it became politically impossible. But they wouldn't have known that at the time. Today a scheme with more than a handful of domestic demolitions probably wouldn't even make it onto a longlist.
 

Helvellyn

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I think the point is that the planners would have thought they could get away with a large amount of demolition, but once it had been done a couple of times and people saw the results on (or above) the ground it became politically impossible. But they wouldn't have known that at the time. Today a scheme with more than a handful of domestic demolitions probably wouldn't even make it onto a longlist.
It probably should be remembered that even through to the 1960s there remained a great many bomb sites in city centres that hadn't been redeveloped. Where many had been it had allowed architects and planners to build big and bold, and there was a school of thought that modernisation was the way to go and that demolishing/redeveloping was in vogue (see London Euston).

There was a proposal in the 1960s to actually demolish Downing Street and the Foreign Office, replacing them with modern office blocks and no doubt some sort of modern penthouse for the PM. Thankfully it never happened and No.s 10 and 11 were effectively rebuilt (the foundations were gone and walls bulging, with risk of collapse).

You just have to look at some Northern cities that really did embrace the urban motorway to see what could have happened (as well as Bristol and to a lesser extent Southampton and Portsmouth).
 

dosxuk

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It's worth noting that one route proposed for motorway access to maplin sounds was to pass to the south of Southend, so plans to demolish or did under half of London wouldn't actually be that outlandish in the overall plans.
 

MP33

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Watching a TV programme about what happened there reminded me that when the Westway was built a large number of houses just off the route were left with a Motorway only feet from their windows. One of these was 10 Rillington Place although it was demolished in the 1970's for other reasons.
 
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