The Junction That Defined East London’s Tech Scene Is About to Change and the Tech Scene Has Moved to Canary Wharf
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Old Street Roundabout: Strong Opinions About Infrastructure
Old Street Roundabout is one of the few pieces of London infrastructure that has acquired genuine cultural significance without being particularly attractive, functional, or pleasant to navigate. It was called Silicon Roundabout when the tech companies were clustering here in the early 2010s, which was a nickname that expressed aspiration rather than description and which has aged in the specific way that aspirational nicknames age: by becoming a historical marker for something that has partly moved on.
The roundabout is being redesigned. The specific details of the redesign — the new street-level crossing, the changes to the underground station entrance, the reconfiguration of the pedestrian flow — are documented in the planning documents I have read because I am the kind of person who reads planning documents about roundabouts, which is a specific personality trait associated with local journalism and certain kinds of cycling advocacy.
What the Roundabout Means
The redesign is, in straightforward terms, an improvement. The current roundabout is hostile to pedestrians, intimidating to cyclists, and creates a junction experience that urban designers describe as “legibility problems” and ordinary people describe as “I nearly got hit by a van.” The new design improves crossing times, creates better cycling infrastructure, and clarifies the pedestrian routes. It is good planning. I support it.
What I want to note, before the redesign is complete and the new junction becomes the normal junction and everyone forgets what it was, is the specific texture of Old Street as it currently exists: the slightly chaotic energy, the mix of old pub and new coffee shop and underground entrance and bus stop and street artist and suit and hoodie, all navigating the same slightly hostile piece of tarmac with the patience and alertness that London pedestrians develop through necessity. The new roundabout will be better. It will also be tidier, and some things that are better for being tidy are also less interesting for being tidy, and I am not saying this is true of roundabouts but I am noting it as a possibility. London transport infrastructure shapes experience in ways that planning documents do not capture. Managing the city’s evolution means sometimes making it worse in the short term so it works better in the long term, and sometimes making it neater in ways that improve function and reduce the productive friction that made it interesting. I hope the redesign gets the balance right. I will walk through it every day and report back.
