Motorway Cities

At​ the grubby end of an afternoon earlier this year I stood with my back to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, watching the traffic on the M8. Here the motorway cuts through the centre of the city after crossing the Clyde, carrying cars from the river’s western reaches to Edinburgh on the east coast. About 70 per cent of Scotland’s population lives along this seventy-mile axis, and this is its densest part, in people as well as in buildings and economic activity. At Charing Cross the M8 cuts off the mostly residential, middle-class West End from the commercial city with its grid plan and hulking Victorian offices. Elsewhere, it separates the city centre from old working-class areas like Springburn and postwar peripheral housing schemes like Easterhouse. When the Glasgow section of the M8 opened on 4 February 1972 a handful of students from the nearby Glasgow School of Art hung banners from a motorway bridge as Gordon Campbell, the secretary of state for Scotland, drove by in his motorcade: ‘This Scar Will Never Heal!’ one of the banners read. To this day, many Glaswegians would agree.

In 2022 a London-based urban designer called Peter Kelly set up a campaign group called Replace the M8. Kelly believes there is a nostalgia for ‘the completeness of the 19th-century city’. What does he want? Tunnels, he says, though he is aware that some cultural revolutionaries want anything resembling a road abolished and the land turned into a park. His own views are more pragmatic: the M8 could become a surface level ‘boulevard’, with light rail, bikes and pedestrians. There might even be some cars, just not very many.

Kelly drafted a petition to the Scottish Parliament proposing an inquiry into the future of the road. Some local politicians have taken up the cause. The beleaguered city council, run by a minority SNP administration, wants to ‘address the negative impacts of the M8 corridor’, but it can’t act itself even if it wanted to because the M8 is owned by Transport Scotland. The council put in a bid for Levelling Up funds to build a ‘garden cap’ over the motorway at Charing Cross, but was unsuccessful. It passed a motion supporting the transformation of the M8 into a ‘boulevard’ (that word again), conjuring images of Paris and nice weather. A report in September 2023 restated the council’s desire to re-engineer or replace the city centre stretch of the M8 with ‘an alternative, lower-speed, non-motorway road’.

Rather than thinking about getting rid of the M8, Transport Scotland is in the middle of a gigantic repair project. The great viaduct at Woodside, just north of the Mitchell Library, where the motorway skirts Garnethill and heads for the Clyde, rests on what are in effect pistons, allowing vertical movement as the traffic passes; inspections in 2020 and 2021 found that the crossheads of 23 of these columns had seriously deteriorated. All 23 need to be propped, but all are slightly different because of ‘the varying column heights, span length and widths’. Services and subway tunnels also have to be avoided, and traffic flow maintained. Academics who work on infrastructure are keen these days on the idea of ‘care’, a sort of emotionally infused maintenance. Road repairs aren’t usually what they have in mind, but I can’t think of a better instance. The propping will take another year or so, and has been accompanied by restrictions on the weight and speed of the traffic (lanes have been closed and the motorway can’t be exited or entered at the usual junctions). The cost is estimated at between £126 million and £152 million for the propping alone. The cost of the permanent repairs that will supposedly follow is ‘in development’. Half a decade of disturbance isn’t making the locals any fonder of the road. But spending all that money isn’t an obvious precursor to demolition.

Elsewhere, however, highways are being torn down. In Boston, another smallish, mostly Victorian, Atlantic seaboard city, a short stretch of the I-93 was moved underground in a scheme known as the Big Dig. Completed in 2007, it took fifteen years and at $24 billion is the most expensive single highway project ever undertaken in the United States. It produced somewhat overdetermined public spaces: the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a 17-acre linear park, is currently festooned with sinister exhortations (‘EXPLORE!’ ‘UNWIND!’). There are better examples. The Cheonggye Elevated Expressway, built in Seoul in 1976, was replaced in 2005 by a watercourse. It is a beautiful park, although the original stream had run dry, so the water is mechanically induced and can be turned off at any time. In Europe, the biggest example by far is Madrid Rio: a ten-kilometre stretch of the M-30 orbital which ran beside the Manzanares river was moved underground and a park built over the top. These were all colossal projects, but there have also been smaller highway removals, from Paris, where the voie Georges Pompidou along the right bank of the Seine was closed to cars, to Utrecht, where a canal that had become a motorway was restored. São Paulo’s Minhocão closes to traffic every weekend and becomes an urban beach.

The story of the M8 starts with the Bruce Report in 1945 (Robert Bruce was Glasgow’s chief engineer). It is remembered for two startling proposals: first, the destruction of almost all of the city centre and its architecturally significant buildings, including the School of Art, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Mitchell Library and the seat of what was then called the Glasgow Corporation, the City Chambers in George Square; second, an entirely new road system, based on an inner ring road, at that point a novelty in the UK. Patrick Abercrombie, then Britain’s most energetic town planner, drew up the 1946 Clyde Valley Regional Plan, which like his earlier scheme for Greater London envisioned that slum-dwellers would be moved out of the city into new towns, and the new low-density park-city criss-crossed by high-speed roads. For his part, Bruce favoured the building of new housing within the city limits.

In the end parts of both plans were implemented. There was large-scale slum clearance, and new towns, new peripheral housing schemes and new roads were built, all on a scale larger than anywhere else in Britain. The Report on a Highway Plan for Glasgow, produced by the consultant engineers Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick for the corporation in 1965, is extraordinarily bold. The city centre – in the report, a dense, slum-ridden, sooty horror – has been evacuated and encircled by a vast motorway on stilts. At Charing Cross, apart from the Mitchell, everything old has gone. It was a genuinely utopian moment. James McCafferty, SWK’s lead engineer, said in 1992 that ‘we felt that we were involved in the greatest work in Scotland.’

There’s no acknowledgment in the report of the noise and fumes, or the thudding of trucks on expansion joints; it’s a lightly sketched city of light and motion. The designers didn’t entirely forget the old city, arguing that the removal of traffic would make historic buildings, like the 12th-century cathedral, more easily visible (though it’s hard to see how the fortunately unbuilt eastern flank of the ring road, which was intended to follow the route of the High Street, the centre of the medieval city, would have enhanced the cathedral’s appeal). Elevated roads were the future, but they were part of a multi-modal system, which included rapid transit and other less glamorous forms of transport. There would be pedestrianisation, lots of it. There was a clear sense of mission. Cities were going to empty out. People were going to have cars, and were going to want to use them. The future was suburban.

There’s something impressively consistent in that 1965 plan, the way its ideas play out at every level. It’s also impressive how much of it actually got built. As a recent BBC Radio 4 documentary put it, Glasgow is the most complete of Britain’s motorway cities, outstripping anything achieved in London, and even car-mad Birmingham. Sometimes, the 1965 plan comes to life. On a summer’s evening, with luck and timing, it is possible to drive in daylight from the Firth of Clyde to the North Sea in a little over an hour. You start out looking across the estuary towards Loch Lomond and the hills of the Trossachs, then swoop through almost all of urban Scotland, ending up at the edge of the North Sea, your right foot scarcely having touched the brake. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it feels like a modern miracle.

The 1965 plan has few real fans now, except perhaps for the enthusiasts behind the astonishingly rich Scottish Roads Archive, but it has a depth of vision, a consistency and scale that are not to be found in contemporary schemes. Any reconstruction of the M8 is going to need similar qualities. In 1965 the city of Glasgow had political power; its equivalent in 2024 is a shell, weakened among other things by the Scottish government’s tendency to centralisation, its privileging of Edinburgh and the ruinous fallout from Glasgow’s equal pay settlement of 2022 (the council paid out £770 million to women council workers who had been paid less than men in equivalent jobs). I talked to Angus Millar, the city’s transport convenor, in early 2023 in his office in the colossal, neo-Renaissance City Chambers, as grand a city seat as any in the world. The room had almost nothing in it, and there appeared to be no one else in the building.

In Scotland there has been no experiment in metropolitan governance as there has been south of the border, producing unexpectedly popular mayors – Sadiq Khan in London or Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester. In July, the new Labour government invited England’s regional mayors to Downing Street. In another world, one where the Scottish government had a demonstrable interest in cities, that might not have mattered. But in the thirty or so of the Scottish government’s de facto ministries, or directorates as they are called, there is no obvious place for cities. There was briefly a cabinet secretary for infrastructure, investment and cities, but the post was abolished in 2016 after just four years, its responsibilities absorbed by the new Directorate for the Rural Economy and Connectivity: the country literally replaced the city. It’s not clear which part of government would be responsible for a large public urban project like the reform of the M8.

The SNP’s power base has traditionally been rural. In this Scotland makes a striking contrast with another independence-minded place, Catalonia. In Barcelona in the early 1990s, it was clear how important the city was. Every park bench, every reconstituted square, almost every paving slab seemed to be an argument for independence. Every part of the city, especially its public spaces, hundreds of which were built under the then mayor, Pasqual Maragall, seemed intended to show that things were done differently there.

In the week I wrote this piece, the mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, talked confidently of building two light rail lines, while Burnham spoke of four extensions to Manchester’s tram system. Glasgow doesn’t have this kind of voice. There is still no rail link to Glasgow Airport, which has long since been overtaken in passenger numbers by Edinburgh. If you walk along Sauchiehall Street towards the M8 at Charing Cross, you pass block after block of empty storefronts and the still abandoned hulk of the School of Art before reaching the motorway itself, roaring away, with dust and litter blowing about.

From Charing Cross, heading due south, the road rises sharply from its trench, and soon it is eighteen metres above ground, as the Kingston Bridge crosses the Clyde. Its designers had to make the bridge passable for ocean-going ships, dredgers and sludgeboats mainly, although nothing has passed this far inland for years. It’s bleak and windy, but there are signs of life underneath the motorway – traces left by skateboarders and street artists. Across the Clyde, there was until recently a popular skatepark, entirely self-organised. Close by, next to the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s monumental former offices, whose top floors are level with the motorway, is the interchange of the M8 and the M74, which leads eventually to the English border. The interchange is one of the city’s largest structures, and as you poke around – mostly alone – you get a sense of what a grand public project this was, how generously landscaped, if now rather neglected. Heading east underneath the M74, you’re on the path of the inner ring road as imagined in 1965. There’s a lot of street art here, some of it very good. Homer Simpson leers out from one of the concrete piers holding up the roadway. In Tradeston the elevated motorway, painted French blue, punches its way through the landscape like a big piece of land art. I don’t mind it, at least as an urban spectacle. The area is home to a lot of small businesses, mostly to do with food and packaging. You head into the inhabited city again in Rutherglen, where the M74 becomes inaccessible to pedestrians, arcing over the railway lines in a final, dramatic gesture before it heads east out of the city and then follows the Clyde down through Lanarkshire.

Andrew Hoolachan, a Glasgow university lecturer sympathetic to the M8 campaign, thinks large-scale change to the motorway is impossible without large-scale political reform. The council is too weak and too poor. He is in favour of some form of metropolitan governance for the city; a reformed M8 might be the right size of project (though there’s also the School of Art to be rescued) and nicely symbolic. In the meantime, some tactical thinking is in order, and there could be a model for it, closer to home than Seoul or Boston or Madrid. The A40(M), better known as the Westway, has sliced impolitely through the inner suburbs of West London since 1970, having caused Haussmann-style devastation during its construction. Now, thanks to a complex, multi-authored, often accidental process, it has become an integral part of the city. It has an enviable, decades-long, not always legal, history of staging music. All the bays under the road are occupied. There is a remarkable range of activity in the area around Ladbroke Grove administered by the Westway Trust: any amount of eating and drinking, vintage clothes, five-a-side football, skateboarding and car repair workshops. There is an impromptu memorial to the nearby Grenfell Tower disaster. Imperial College has announced plans for a student hub in one of the bays. You can even ride a horse. It vastly exceeds anything imagined by the Westway’s original designers, or by the activists who proposed occupying the bays in 1970. So dense is the activity in the undercroft, the road is often scarcely noticeable. If it once read as a wound, or a scar, it no longer does – it has become a place.