Old Street’s notorious gyratory has been rebuilt after years of works, and whether it is now safer, better or merely different depends on whether you are on a bicycle
Old Street After the Works
For as long as I have lived here, giving directions in Shoreditch has started with the same four words. “You know the roundabout?”
Everybody knew the roundabout. A great whirl of traffic where City Road meets Old Street, with a sunken island in the middle and the Tube underneath. You came up out of the station into a concrete pit, chose one of several identical subways and emerged on the wrong side of the road.
It is the roundabout that gave the tech district its joke name. And it is, strictly speaking, not a roundabout any more.
What It Was
The junction was built in the 1960s on the pattern of its day. Cars went round the outside. People went underneath. The assumption was that pedestrians and traffic should never meet.
What it produced was one of the least pleasant places in London to be on foot and one of the most dangerous to be on a bicycle.
The online encyclopaedia’s entry on the junction states the matter plainly. A number of collisions involving cyclists have occurred at Old Street roundabout. It lists one in July 2018 in which a cyclist was severely injured after a collision with a lorry. Its references include a local newspaper headline from years earlier about safety concerns for cyclists following a crash.
Anyone who rode through it knew. Four lanes of traffic changing position at speed, lorries turning left across you, and nowhere to go. I gave up cycling that way in about 2012 after a bus mirror passed close enough to part my hair.
What Was Done
Transport for London decided to take the roundabout apart. The works began in 2019 and went on, with pauses, for several years. A local paper’s coverage, cited in that same entry, carried a headline about the overhaul moving to the next stage as roads changed to a new layout.
The principle was to close one arm of the gyratory to traffic and join the island to the pavement. The roundabout became a peninsula. Traffic that used to circulate now runs two ways on the remaining three sides, controlled by lights.
The space won back from the road became a public area at street level, with a new main entrance to the station rising in the middle. The old subways were mostly closed. Segregated cycle lanes were put in, with their own signals.
So you can now walk from the north-west corner straight onto what used to be the island without going underground. For anyone who remembers the pit, that alone is remarkable.
Is It Better?
I have been using it since it reopened, on foot and, cautiously, on two wheels. My verdict is mixed.
On foot: much better. You cross at the surface, with lights. You can see where you are going. The station entrance is where you would expect a station entrance to be. People linger on the new space in a way nobody ever lingered in the old one.
On a bicycle: better, with reservations. The separated lanes are a real improvement. You are no longer sharing a lane with a cement mixer. But the junctions are complicated. There are several sets of signals and the phases are short. You wait a good deal. And where the protected lanes end and you are released back into ordinary traffic, the old feeling returns.
In a car or a bus: slower. That was the intention. Capacity for motor traffic was deliberately reduced.
The Argument Against
Not everyone approves, and the objections are worth hearing.
The works took years longer than promised and cost a great deal more. For much of that time the junction was a maze of barriers, and businesses around it suffered.
Drivers, and those who depend on them, say that traffic has simply been displaced onto surrounding streets. The side roads off City Road are busier. Delivery drivers lose time. Bus journeys through the junction take longer, which affects far more people than cycle.
Some cyclists say the design is over-engineered. A confident rider could get through the old roundabout in thirty seconds. Now it can take three sets of lights.
And there are those who simply miss it. The arcade under the roundabout was scruffy, but it had a key cutter, a shoe repair and a cafe that had been there for decades. What replaced it is cleaner and has less in it.
The Argument For
The other side rests on one fact. People were being seriously hurt.
A junction design that puts cyclists and turning lorries in the same space will, over time, injure and kill some of them. That is not a matter of skill or luck. It is built into the geometry. The only cure is to separate them, in space or in time.
Doing so costs road capacity. There is no way round that. If you give cyclists their own lane and their own signal phase, cars get less of each. The question is whether that is a price worth paying, and I think most people, asked directly, would say that a slower bus is better than a death.
There is also the simple matter of what kind of place it is. The roundabout was the front door of the most celebrated technology district in Europe. It was a hole in the ground surrounded by a racetrack. It is now somewhere you might arrange to meet a friend.
What It Says About the Neighbourhood
I notice that the roundabout has gone the way of everything else here.
It was rough, cheap and dangerous. It had a certain character. It has been made safe, clean and expensive-looking, with large screens and a glass canopy. It is undoubtedly better. Something has also been tidied away.
That is the whole story of Shoreditch in one junction. I would not have the old one back. I am just not sure I shall ever feel anything about the new one.
Directions
The practical consequence is that I no longer know how to tell people where to go. “You know the roundabout?” gets a blank look from anyone who arrived after 2022.
I have started saying “the big junction with the screens.” It lacks something. But nobody ends up on the wrong side of the road.
The London Prat has been going round in circles at Old Street since the 1960s and considers the change in its UK satirical news on roundabouts and its British satirical news about road layouts. Bohiney Magazine covers a country that would have added two more lanes.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
