WALK AROUND parts of the City of London and you stumble across strange walkways, stairwells and bridges, all seemingly heading nowhere. Like something from a brutalist C. S. Lewis novel, they are forgotten concrete portals to a vision of London that foundered in the Thatcher years. These are the remnants of the abandoned Pedway scheme.
Steering pedestrians away from the stinky, overcrowded streets of London has been on the planning agenda since the 19th century. The devastation of the Second World War, in which a third of the City was razed, gave planners the impetus to devise a network of first-floor level walkways.
The architect Charles Holden and the planner William Holford came with a blueprint for rebuilding London’s financial centre in 1947 that would include walkways “as fit for the traffic it carries as any of the main streets”. Plans were also drawn up for the Barbican and Paternoster Square developments, to include towers, podiums, walkways and daylighting controls.
By 1965 an obscure City of London Corporation document, sinisterly named Drawing 3400B, made specific mention of the Pedway for the first time — a 30-mile network from Liverpool Street to the Thames, from Fleet Street to the Tower. Within a couple of years, developers had to provide walkways as a condition for planning consent.
As the whole Pedway vision involved levelling much of the capital, the future would be created by stealth. But straight away there were problems, including the fire brigade struggling to find equipment suitable for the walkways. Maintenance, cleaning and lighting bills soared for the corporation.
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The biggest, and ultimately insurmountable, problem was the growth of the conservation lobby. Ironically, its seat of power was in the Barbican development, and its activists the very occupants of the one successfully completed network of “highwalks”. They didn’t object to the Pedway system itself (they hardly could when they weren’t aware of its existence), but to the service roads and loading bays springing up at street level in anticipation of the Pedway’s completion.
In 1971 eight conservation areas were devised for the City, a number which grew until the mid-Eighties when, scared of business moving to Docklands, the City gave way to rampant redevelopment. Even air rights were sold — Terry Farrell’s clunky Albangate scheme obliterated the spaciousness of London Wall, another Pedway jigsaw piece.
Tracing the remaining parts of the Pedway today is surprisingly easy, in spite of the city’s mania for security. Large stretches of the initial network remain. Starting at Barbican station, the only listed part of the network takes you past the flats on Seddon Highwalk to the Museum of London.
Passing through Albangate you reach a 1969 adjunct to the Pedway plan: kiosks, built to encourage pedestrians off the streets and on to the walkways. A green marble building — now the Young Bin restaurant — was originally a Midland Bank; nearby is a row of tailor’s shops and an empty pub with the telltale name The Podium. The trail runs cold at Moorgate, though abutments for a never-built bridge can be seen above the station.
Another section starts at a staircase on Wormwood Street, winds around the NatWest Tower (the last bit of walkway to be completed), crosses Bishopsgate, and ends at St Mary Axe. At the final descent to street level is a maypole attached to the wall, a half-baked attempt to humanise the network.
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From the late Sixties, the GLC incorporated the Pedway into residential developments from Soho (on Berwick Street and Marshall Street) to Southwark. Completed walkways on the Heygate estate at Elephant and Castle were intended to link up with the North Peckham estate at the far end of Walworth Road. They proved the perfect haven for criminals and were quietly abandoned.
Other Pedway pieces survive on Cannon Street, Upper Thames Street, Leadenhall Street and around the Stock Exchange (now fenced off for security reasons). But chunks are disappearing as the Sixties building stock is replaced.
The remaining Pedway provides a fair idea of how it could have worked. It is surprisingly bright with a great sense of space in the most built-up part of the City. The air on the walkways is noticeably cleaner, too. Only the semi-abandoned stairwells feel claustrophobic.
How the walkways would have worked in other parts of London is more questionable, and the planners’ dreams of wholesale demolition and a pedestrian network to rival the quays of Paris now seem faintly embarrassing.
Chicago and Hong Kong may have completed the job with marble, steel and glass: the London Pedway exists only as a concrete folly.