ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the intellectual context that gave birth to proposals for London’s Ringways. Transport and roads had assumed growing importance since the start of the twentieth century. The advent of the motor vehicle as a new technology generated new challenges of safety and technical performance, which transport professionals increasingly felt demanded an engineered solution, while town planners saw the integration of new forms of mobility into the built environment as a requirement of a well-designed town. Both schools of thought were brought together by Alker Tripp in the early 1940s and proved influential on Patrick Abercrombie’s London plans. These approaches became dominant in the era of the New Town, but were driven by a wish for environmental management and unrestricted movement more than an ambition to directly encourage travel by private car. This postwar consensus reached its apogee with the publication of Colin Buchanan’s Traffic in Towns, in which Buchanan united environmental concerns with a faith in the power of civil engineering. Though arguably unrealistic, it created a moment in which road building was widely thought to present an effective answer to the environmental consequences of traffic. This ‘Buchanan moment’ would occur just as London’s Ringways were being conceptualised for the first time.
