The Motorway Comes
In the mid 1960’s an overhead motorway, the A40(M) was driven through North Kensington staked out on giant stilts - the largest continuous concrete structure in the country. Two and a half miles of new road made it the longest stretch of elevated motorway in Europe.
The new highway made driving in and out of the city much easier, allowing vehicles to cover in minutes ground that used to take over an hour to travel. However, while reducing congestion in the city, the highway carried the traffic above the lives of people living in North Kensington, with 47,000 cars a day travelling through their rooftops within the first few months of opening. The flyover brought noise, disruption, destruction and pollution to a community that was already contending with economic hardship, a decaying inner city environment and neglect.
The newly opened Westway Flyover
Protest, Campaign and Trust
To make way for the modern engineering feat, homes were demolished and streets chopped in half or left stranded as little as twenty feet away, exposed to the noise of traffic and the nightly glare of headlights. The protests of local residents hit the headlines when the motorway opened in 1970. By then a decade of community action networks had grown up in the fight for better housing and open spaces where children could play. Energetic activists set up grass root associations, organised on local issues and campaigned for improvements.
Following a four year campaign, it was decided that the mile strip of land under the motorway which lay within the boroughs boundaries would be used to compensate the community for the damage and destruction caused by the road. North Kensington Amenity Trust – now the Westway Trust, was set up in partnership with the local authority, holding the land in trust to ensure local people would be actively involved in determining its use.