Building for Transport V: Roads

The impact of the automobile on Ireland is a phenomenon which played out with increasing intensity in the decades after the Second World War. By the start of the 1960s, traffic volumes were so high in many towns and cities, and congestion so severe, that various reports were commissioned to identify solutions. In 1961 the German transport expert Karl-Heinz Schaechterle was appointed to produce a traffic report for Dublin Corporation. His 1965 General Traffic Plan for Dublin advocated inter alia an outer ring dual-carriageway on the routes of the Grand and Royal Canals. A traffic plan was also produced for Cork while in September 1964 Belfast Corporation approved in principle the Belfast Urban Motorway Scheme. Two-and-a-half years later, this detailed plan by R. Travers Morgan & Partners was published. It delineates the optimal route and necessary infrastructure for a ‘bold and imaginative’ elevated inner ring road, six to eight lanes wide, connecting via five major interchanges to a network of radial motorways. The motorway scheme was further elaborated in a second report by the same consultants, the Belfast Transportation Plan, in 1969.

The Urban Motorway Plan suggested that within a decade of its publication, by 1976, the motorway it delineated would be complete. However, even without the impact of the Troubles, which the consultants could be excused for not anticipating, the logistics and costs of the undertaking were such that the proposed time frame was entirely unrealistic. Half the Urban Motorway was eventually built. The rest is unlikely now to materialise, while accommodating the impact of the completed section continues to present challenges.

Ringing Belfast

Mark Hackett

In1967 the engineering consultants R. Travers Morgan & Partners (N. I.) published their Report on Belfast Urban Motorway. They followed this in 1969 with their Belfast Transport Plan. Taken together, the two volumes are a culmination of road plans for Belfast that evolved from the late 1950s following visits by officials to study the American interstate road system. Beautifully produced, the hardbacked volumes belie the structural violence they represent, a violence that continues to blight the lives of current city residents. Particularly striking in the volumes are the lines of the raised motorway laid over the canvas of old city maps, but there is no analysis or sense of the city that Belfast was, how it worked and how the motorway would change it. One also cannot fail to correlate the publication dates with both the emergence of the Civil Rights movement and the first unrest of the conflict that erupted in August 1969, often on the paths being cleared for urban road schemes.

A seminal work on urbanism from this time, and one directly relevant to the Belfast condition, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published by Jane Jacobs in 1961. Jacobs eloquently attacks the interstate road projects of urban planner Robert Moses in New York and gives clear voice to a practical and iterative urbanism, thinking that endures today. None of her critique seems to have entered the consciousness of the Belfast planners or road engineers.

The path for the first phase of the Belfast motorway had already been cleared when Ron Wiener published his 1975 book The Rape and Plunder of the Shankill. Community Action: The Belfast Experience (26.1) Wiener lived in and studied the Shankill area, documenting the effects of redevelopment for the Belfast urban motorway project in a study that has become renowned in urban sociology. As Wiener explains, in 1956 areas of housing ‘slums’ were designated around central Belfast. This led to hastened decline in the decade leading up to the conflict, as landlord owners knew they would be compensated for housing to be demolished and so had no motivation to repair or maintain the existing stock. The designated areas became hollowed out, a background for the sweeping curves of the motorway that can be seen in the Travers Morgan volumes (26.2).

Northern Ireland had benefited from post Second World War reform in education and from the introduction of the National Health Service, but progress in housing and urban repair was slow. The Stormont government and Belfast Corporation were unmotivated to build housing based on need. Housing was, in part, linked to gerrymandering in the voting system within what was effectively a single-party state. Belfast was seen by those in political power, with their regional and rural interests, as a dense and troublesome city with a large working class. There was a desire to deconstruct Belfast, to curb its economic power, and this inherent tension between city and regional governance continues to play out today. Belfast is a city that for seven decades has not held the levers to manage itself, nor has it retained a cohesive civic identity to argue effectively for its own urbanism.

New approach roads to the city were being progressed in the post-war era and the need to connect these expanded into the emerging plan for a ring of urban motorways first which was mooted in 1960-61. While there was certainly some need to make a connection between the approach roads and Belfast Docks, and a parallel requirement for new city bridges, these immediate and achievable objectives became tied up in the grand urban motorway scheme. The motorway became the predetermined element in the Robert Matthew’s 1963 Regional Survey and Plan for Belfast which outlined a network of growth towns and new industry connected by roads. A rational alignment of regional motorways would have placed key interchanges well outside the city. Instead, and ironically, for a decentralisation proposal, the motorways were to link in a loop tightly knotted around central Belfast (26.3).

The impact of the Oil Crisis, coupled with building inflation and the urban conflict, did stop the work on the motorway for a time. A 1977 Public Inquiry on the paused project did approve the west section but as a downgraded, sunken dual carriageway, the Westlink. In hindsight, the original Travers Morgan raised motorway option would have caused less urban severance (26.5). The Westlink was only partly sunken, its undulating slip road interchanges, waste sites and drainage causing great disturbance to what were once arterial streets.

The Westlink and the river crossing legs of the motorway were completed in 1983 and 1993 respectively. The southern and eastern sections were eventually abandoned, a logic that diagrams hint was known at the time (26.6). The crucial connecting link or interchange for three regional motorways in North Belfast remains unrealised. Instead, the most important motorway junction in the region has been left for over forty years as a street level, traffic-light controlled junction. The current project to remove the traffic lights may only be completed in 2036, a full seventy-five years on from its first design, assuming they are removed at all.