Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation

Walkways in the sky: the return of London's forgotten 'pedways'

This article is more than 5 years old

They were planned after the second world war to whisk people above car-choked streets in the financial district, but remained unpopular and half-built. Now, pedestrian walkways are being reimagined for a 21st-century city

On Pudding Lane in the City of London, the fateful alleyway where the Great Fire began in 1666, an unprepossessing staircase leads off the cobbled street. There doesn’t seem to be much reason to climb the steps, tucked away behind a row of granite columns at the base of a dumpy office block, but inquisitive walkers will be rewarded. Those who follow the stairs find themselves led along a walkway, shuttled across a bridge above a busy dual carriageway, channelled through a gloomy undercroft, finally emerging on to a deserted piazza raised above the Thames, with one of the most unexpected prospects in London: a wide-open river view. The Shard stands straight ahead, Tower Bridge rises to the east and the new tower of the South Bank sparkles to the west.

This forgotten terrace, miraculously left uncolonised by a riverside dining concept, is a fragment of a larger vision that would have seen the entire City area threaded with a network of elevated walkways, punctuated by such squares in the sky. The “pedway” was an ambitious postwar plan to whisk pedestrians up from the car-choked streets of London and give them a utopia of streamlined paths and bridges, providing safe and efficient passage between the financial hubs of the Square Mile.

  • The Highwalk at London Wall in 1962

The network was intended to stretch for 30 miles, from Fleet Street to the Tower of London, and from Liverpool Street to the Thames, but only a fraction was built, much of which has since been demolished. A few fragments remain, from plaintive bridge abutments still waiting for their connection to arrive, to winding staircases that lead to dead-end landings, scattered across the City like curious portals to a secret dimension.

Just when the last remains appeared to be facing extinction, these floating walkways are showing signs of a revival. The London Wall Place project includes a new network of flying decks and serpentine walkways that thread their way around ancient chunks of the Roman city wall. Together with 21 Moorfields – the shopping mall at the new Crossrail station at Moorgate – they herald the beginning of an elevated journey where you will be able to go from Moorgate to the Museum of London without touching the ground.

  • London Wall in 1970. Photograph: Granger/Rex/Shutterstock

The parallel pedestrian universe was first hinted at by architects William Holford and Charles Holden, who drew up a plan for rebuilding London’s financial centre in 1947, after it had been devastated by bombing during the second world war. “There is, of course, even a functional pattern in the ant-heap,” they wrote, describing the jumbled network of alleyways and spaces that defined the medieval street network of the City. “The planner’s problem is to make this pattern more efficient.” Their plan contained a bold chapter on pedestrian ways that were to be “as fit for the traffic it carries as any of the main streets”, an idea that would inform the redevelopment of the City for the next three decades.

  • An elevated walkway at Fore Street in the Barbican Centre leading to the Plough pub. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer

The urge to separate pedestrians from traffic was nothing new: the construction of Holborn Viaduct, Rosebery Avenue and Clerkenwell Road in the 19th century were all attempts to sweep people up above the noise and grime down below. But the rapid growth of car ownership in the 1950s and 60s spawned increasing anxiety around congestion and collision, leading to the widely accepted belief that people and cars should be segregated for the benefit of both. The influential book Traffic in Towns, published by planner Colin Buchanan in 1964, set the mould for the hostile apparatus of flyovers, gyratories and ring roads that would proliferate across British cities for the rest of the 20th century.

“It was because traffic engineers were in charge,” says Peter Rees, chief planner of the City of London from 1985 to 2014, now a professor at University College London, explaining the origins of the pedway. “It wasn’t driven by some great feeling of compassion towards pedestrians; it was simply about getting people out of the way in order to speed up traffic flow.” With the new dual carriageways of London Wall and Lower Thames Street slicing right through the centre of the capital, pedestrians were lifted up on bridges so they wouldn’t slow down the cars.

The doctrine of vertical separation informed the reconstruction plans for the major bomb sites of the Barbican and Paternoster Square, both designed with towers emerging from podiums, threaded with pedestrian walkways. The former remains a thrilling (if labyrinthine) brutalist Babylon of bush-hammered concrete bridges over bodies of water, christened with names such as Speed Highwalk. The latter was a bleak, barren expanse of elevated paving between dreary office blocks and, thankfully, no longer exists.

Apart from these projects, the rest of the pedway plan was developed almost by stealth. An obscure City of London Corporation document published in 1965, mysteriously known as Drawing 3400B, mentioned the pedway by name for the first time and, within a couple of years, the provision of dedicated pedestrian walkways had become cemented in policy as a condition for securing planning consent.

In a revealing documentary, Elevating London, Michael Hebbert, professor of planning at UCL, sheds light on the haphazard nature of the pedway’s evolution. “It was never really conceived as a system,” he says. “They didn’t even have a drawing of the network as a whole. It had to be constructed from the separate planning consents for individual office blocks.” It was a British version of a postwar planning strategy that would eschew a top-down vision for an incremental network that would be negotiated on an ad hoc, site-by-site basis – and thus almost doomed to fail from the beginning.

  • Main image: The Barbican Estate viewed from the roof of Cromwell Tower in 2010. Below: Pedways within the Barbican Centre. Photographs: Peter MacDiarmid/Getty/Oliver Wainwright

The piecemeal plan was to be lubricated by incentives. Developers were offered plot ratio concessions, allowing them to squeeze more rentable office area out of their sites, and permitted to use their pedway-connection platforms for temporary offices, giving them extra revenue while they waited to be joined to their neighbour – connections that would usually never arrive. Walking the streets of the City today, you can still make out chunks of unconsummated pedway at first-floor level that have remained glazed in ever since. Other sections have been spruced up: at Suffolk Lane, just east of Cannon Street station, a pedway ramp begins inside a grand neoclassical colonnade before emerging on to a bridge, recently clad in smart timber slats. A forlorn concrete bridge over Wormwood Street, meanwhile, has just been adorned with a traditional Korean house, impaled at an angle as if fallen from the skies, by artist Do Ho Suh. Redundant for their original purpose, these aerial fingers are becoming armatures for other inventive happenings.

  • A drawbridge-like pedway entrance into Alban Gate. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright

Beyond the lack of a joined-up masterplan, there were plenty of other obstacles to the pedway’s progression. Development didn’t proceed quite as quickly as had been imagined, while the fire brigade struggled to find equipment suitable for the walkways and the police were unsure of their legal powers on these new-fangled floating arteries. All the while, bills for maintenance, cleaning and lighting soared. But the main problem was that people didn’t use them. As Rees explains: “In as far as people carry mental maps to get around, those maps are based on streets. The minute you displace that map by taking people up on to walkways, their mental map function breaks down and they get lost.”

  • Clockwise from top left: The abandoned Plough pub in the Barbican centre; Fyefoot Lane pedway, over Upper Thames Street; A pedway to nowhere at the foot of Tower 42 and the route to the riverside terrace, off Pudding Lane. Photographs: Alamy/Oliver Wainwright

The effort of going up a flight of stairs only to come down another also proved less attractive to many than the prospect of gingerly picking their way along the kerb of a dual carriageway. The growing conservation movement put up a strong fight, too. Looking at the 1963 map, it is not hard to see why, given that sections of pedways appear to slice right through St Paul’s Cathedral.

  • The Suffolk Lane pedway, east of Cannon Street station, was recently clad with timber. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright

With the Big Bang of the 1980s, which brought about deregulation, banks started to acquire larger sites to accommodate their dealing floors, making it harder to thread pedestrians through the buildings at first-floor level. A belated attempt to lure people up to the existing walkways with pubs, shops and kiosks came too late. Architect Terry Farrell’s Alban Gate, a gargantuan postmodern palace that straddled London Wall and was completed in 1992, was one of the few projects of the era that embraced the pedway, welcoming people with a theatrical drawbridge entrance, but few others followed suit, leaving the Barbican and Museum of London sites as quaint anomalies.

So it comes as a surprise to walk along London Wall today and find a rusted orange steel bridge flung above the carriageway. This is London Wall Place, one of the most agile projects to emerge from Make Architects, which has reimagined the pedway as a more playful and generous version of the original, with decks wide enough to incorporate benches on which you might want to sit awhile, beside green walls and reflecting pools.

  • The reimagined High Walk pedway at London Wall Place. Photographs: Oliver Wainwright/Alamy

It will soon be joined a little way to the north by Wilkinson Eyre’s 21 Moorfields project, the commercial bounty of Moorgate station’s Crossrail redevelopment, a 564,000 sq ft glass and steel behemoth that will be connected to the Barbican at first-floor level by a modern interpretation of the highwalk, welcoming you in to the inevitable podium of retail and dining opportunities. Like London Wall Place, it will be a hulking beast, but, as you are led through the sequence of walkways in a suspended realm between street and slab, you probably won’t even notice.

The elevated network will end at the Museum of London site, where the new £250m Centre for Music is planned. The concert hall’s design is appropriately in the hands of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, architects of New York’s High Line, who have a penchant for aerial drama.

The ultimate City-wide plan will never be realised, but, more than 50 years from its conception, these segments of pedway are being reincarnated in a more imaginative form than ever.

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, and explore our archive here

Most viewed

Most viewed