Harper-Thames on TfL’s Plans for Silicon Roundabout, What Makes a Junction Work, and Why Pedestrians in East London Deserve Better Than They Currently Have
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
By Harper-Thames | ShoreRoar.com
The Old Street Roundabout has been the subject of improvement plans, consultation documents, design competitions, and earnest Transport for London communications for the better part of a decade, and it remains, as of this writing, a roundabout. Not just any roundabout: one of London’s most hostile pedestrian environments, a seven-lane gyratory that surrounds a tunnel entrance and manages a volume of traffic that the surrounding tech economy has brought to the area without any corresponding improvement to the pedestrian and cycling infrastructure that the people working in that tech economy use to get to it. You cannot cycle around Old Street Roundabout with any reasonable confidence of survival. You can cross it on foot through a system of subterranean passages that are fine when they’re clean and staffed by the Big Issue seller who constitutes most of the subterranean social infrastructure and less fine when they’re not.
The Plans
Transport for London’s most recent consultation on the Old Street redesign proposes to remove the gyratory circulation system and replace it with a conventional signalised junction, improve the pedestrian realm at surface level, upgrade the cycling provision on the surrounding streets, and generally transform what is currently a space that is hostile to everyone except the traffic it prioritises into a space that is navigable for people who are not in cars. This is a good plan. It is a plan that urban designers and transport policy advocates have been calling for since approximately 2014. The consultation has been running in various forms for nearly as long. The implementation timeline, last I checked, placed construction in the late 2020s.
The specific frustration of the Old Street situation is that it is not a difficult design problem. The principles of what a good urban junction looks like — compact pedestrian crossings, protected cycling infrastructure, reduced vehicle speed, surface-level rather than subterranean pedestrian routing — are well-established and have been implemented in multiple London junctions and extensively in other European cities without apparent difficulty. What makes the Old Street redesign take a decade is not the engineering. It is the governance: the coordination between TfL, Hackney Council, Islington Council, and the various utility and highway authorities whose infrastructure occupies the subterranean space beneath the roundabout, combined with the funding cycles, the consultation requirements, and the procurement processes that large public infrastructure projects must navigate before a shovel enters the ground.
Why This Matters for the Neighbourhood
Old Street Roundabout is the symbolic centre of what was rebranded Silicon Roundabout and what is now simply the dense tech and creative cluster of EC2 and E1. It is the point through which tens of thousands of people pass daily by tube, bus, and on foot, and it is a junction that treats those tens of thousands as an inconvenience to be managed through subterranean routing rather than as the primary users of the public space it occupies. The companies in the surrounding area have brought significant economic activity to East London. The people who work in them have brought significant residential density. The roundabout has not been updated to reflect either development. It continues to prioritise through-traffic in the way that junctions in this part of London were designed to prioritise in the 1960s, when the planning consensus held that urban motorways and free-flowing vehicle traffic were the measure of a modern city. The consensus has changed. The roundabout has not.
According to Transport for London‘s own research, the Old Street area has one of the highest rates of pedestrian casualties of any comparable junction in Inner London, which is a statistic that does not require elaboration but which has apparently not been sufficient to accelerate the redesign to a timeline that reflects its urgency. The redesign is coming. The consultation is ongoing. The timeline is the timeline. In the meantime, I navigate the subterranean passages and emerge on whichever side of the roundabout they exit to and walk to wherever I am going, which is what everyone does because there is not currently a better option. The better option is on the drawing. It will be in the ground eventually. East London can wait. East London has been waiting for this particular improvement for ten years. A few more are manageable. But the roundabout remains, daily, a specific reminder that infrastructure follows investment at a lag that can be measured in decades and experienced in slightly elevated blood pressure at every crossing attempt.
Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch and East London’s infrastructure. Her homepage is at The London Prat.
For more East London urban development writing, visit NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The longer I live in East London, the more I find that the infrastructure arguments — the roundabout, the cycle lanes, the pedestrian crossings, the tube stations — are the arguments that matter most to daily quality of life in ways that the cultural economy arguments, however important, do not match for immediacy. The cultural economy produces the interesting things to do. The transport infrastructure determines whether you can get to them and how tired you are when you arrive. East London has, over the past decade, developed some genuinely excellent cycling and pedestrian infrastructure on specific corridors — the Quietways, the protected lanes on some of the major roads — and has a long distance to go to reach the standard that Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or even central Paris maintains as a baseline. The Old Street redesign, when it happens, will be one significant step in the right direction. There are many more steps required after it. The direction is correct. The pace is slower than the ambition. This is London transport policy in its characteristic state: moving in the right direction at a pace that is faster than it used to be and slower than the need requires. I will be here, cycling around the edges of the roundabout on the routes that avoid it, until the better version of it exists. Then I will cycle through it and feel the specific satisfaction of infrastructure that has finally arrived.
