Cllr Lucy Ivimy's speech to the Council meeting on Wednesday evening
The Hammersmith flyover was a triumph of modern engineering when it and the A4 were built in 1961. Both hugely eased the flow westward of traffic along the then Great West Road. There had been a debate on the relative merits of flyover and tunnel beforehand – but tunnelling was then relatively far more costly than now. And great noble expanses of concrete were fashionable then.
In the 1960s – and of course the planning of this took place in the 1950s – traffic and car ownership were a small fraction of what they are now. The number of vehicles on the road must have gone up by at least fourfold. The damage of that traffic has gone up by more – a small amount of traffic on a road brings welcome life, a very large amount is utterly destructive.
Ravenscourt Park Ward does not have the shadow of the flyover hanging over it, but it has been slashed in two by the almighty roar of the A4. Walk along it and the poison of that road, the noise, the pollution and the dead dereliction that abuts it, is striking. When canvassing, it is difficult ever to find someone in at a property adjacent to it. When I have done so, I have heard a litany of ill health which I am very confident is caused in no small part by the air pollution and the stress of the constant traffic roar.
How fantastic it would be to replace the flyover with a tunnel, and to extend that tunnel beneath the A4 to the far side of the Hogarth roundabout to ease the traffic flow there as well.
It would have to be a bored tunnel, not a cut and cover, to go beneath the underground lines, Stamford Brook, and countless other rivulets and pipes that cross it on the way to the river.
You would have to leave a road along the current A4 route, but one half the width of the dual carriageway, with surface crossings, and life. A long strip of land along th road would be released for positive use: open space, housing, offices and retail.
The benefits are clear: Hammersmith no longer cut in two, Furnivall Gardens increased in size, homes currently blighted because of the pollution and noise made pleasant, St Paul’s church no longer overshadowed by traffic roar and its green space made peaceful, open space released by Hammersmith Broadway – how about a permanent open market to rival London Bridge; less noise and less pollution throughout Hammersmith. The air from the tunnel would be scrubbed of its pollution before release.
The cost? The Hindhead tunnel, which involves 4 miles of new A3 of which 1 mile is tunnel, cost £371m which gives a ballpark to work on. The development profits from that strip of land released by the tunnel would provide at least partial funding for it.
The French do these projects all the time. In Boston they are putting their entire highway network in vast tunnels. This Hammersmith project is totally achievable, and I strongly urge this Council to work towards making a tunnel a reality.
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