On Saturday whilst giving a James Bond Walking Tour, I had a brief opportunity to see the changes at Aldwych in Central London.
Aldwych has always been funny kind of place. Neither here nor there really. A gateway to Covent Garden, except it’s not. Roads leading down to the river, Fleet Street and the City as well of course The Strand west towards Trafalgar Square and the bright lights of the West End.
What Aldwych has always been for my life has been a grey, busy, confusing, traffic heaving mess. As you can see from the map above, a neighbourhood surrounded by multi-laned traffic which as a driver was often a nightmare, particularly since some of the stupid complications which have been put in place in recent decades.
As a pedestrian however it was almost a completely no-go area. And it never should have been as it’s such an interesting and historic area. There are embassies for India and Australia, the old BBC World Service headquarters, a plethora of fancy hotels, restaurants and theatres on the crescent and the perennially underused Somerset House down below. Not to mention Kings College, the Royal Courts of Justice and two wonderful old churches and a few holy wells.
Aldwych is an old Anglo-Saxon part of London when many didn’t want to live amongst the ruins of old Roman Londinium. Possibly an old port and all of this can be deducted by its archaic spelling and it’s been a busy old place for all this time until Covid arrived and long-held plans to make this a more friendly place for people rather than cars was finally put into place.
No longer is Aldwych one of the most polluted parts of London as over the past two years, busy roadways have been converted into a welcoming public space measuring more than 7000m2 – the size of a football pitch – along the Strand, complemented by a vastly improved experience for pedestrians across Aldwych.
Westminster City Council has invested £22m in the project which links together some of the capital’s most important cultural and educational centres like never before and creates a new destination in its own right – a social space for these neighbouring institutions to co-mingle and interact.
Other elements of the transformation scheme include:
- Pedestrian and cycle zone with increased cycle parking and improved cycle and pedestrian safety at junctions. Adjacent roads have widened footways with reduced street clutter and crossings on desire lines.
- Seating and resting areas with trees for shade, making this busy throughfare linking the City with Westminster a place to relax for the first time in history
- Improvement to wayfinding, encouraging visitors to walk and explore the wider area
- 1,370m2 of greening with year-round colour as well as support for biodiversity. 41 trees with spring flowers and autumn interest including: Alamanchier, Ulums New Horizon and Betula Edinburgh
- Environmental benefits, including supporting pollinators, cooling the urban heat in summer, better air quality due to the reduced vehicular congestion in the area
- It will act as a platform for a revolving round of new and exciting artist commissions to be changed throughout the year
So not so much one of my Secret Gardens of the City of London but a very easy to find public space.
The area now is green with a multitude of seating everywhere. Though not clear from my hurried photo, the the 6 lanes of traffic that surrounded the church have completely gone and replaced by something of a minimal lane for emergency access only.
Look at the side of St Marys Le Strand, so filthy from centuries of traffic and what most of London looked like in the 20th Century, here still dirty as it was physically impossible to keep it clean due to the busy roads. Hopefully now with calm and tranquility and what passes for fresh air in London, it can be made as gleaming white as the rest of the city.
Stephen Liddell 
When I was a student I used to live near the centre of London and often did wander around places like Aldwych.
Years ago, long after graduating, I was driving round there and due to all the No Right Turn and one way systems, I drove round and round there and over several bridges and back about a dozen times trying to get to Camden Town. Those six lanes did no good to me!
I was eventually stopped by a police woman in a parked police car on “Terrorist Watch” asking me what I was doing, “You don’t seem to have any idea where you are going!”
“I don’t!” I cried! “I don’t even know what post code I am, never mind which page of the A to Z! It’s all the one way systems!”
She ran my details and then gave me directions to Euston.
“If you cannot find Camden Town from there, it’s not an A to Z you need, it’s treatment!”
Oddly, my English teacher said a similar thing when I asked how can we look up a word in a dictionary if we don’t know how to spell it.
Do you think it’s me? 😀
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More than once I got a bit confused there, mainly because of traffic light cameras and bus lane cameras and cameras fining you for not knowing where the one way system went. I ended up south of the river as it was the only way I could be half sure it was ok! It was at 10pm so you couldn’t see the signs. Later I would turn down tourists staying at a particular hotel there as between the buses, the double yellow and red lines and the traffic cameras and all round hell, nothing was worth the money! That’s funny about the terrorist police. I was once stopped as a suspect for carrying a 20-30 foot long giant Toblerone bar at the time of the last IRA bombs… they thought it was a giant suspect package. Once you get to Euston road then you’re kind of safe and heading to North London. Just try and avoid Swiss Cottage and or a particular set of traffic lights on Kilburn High Road 🙂
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LOL! A dirty chocolate bomb?
They are removing the Matterhorn from the Toblerone packaging, as the owners are moving production to the States and they can’t say it’s Swiss if not made in Switzerland. Shame. I wonder what they’ll use instead? Mount Wilson?
But what were you doing with a 20 foot Toblerone!? The largest I remember seeing was about 4 or 5 feet! These days, about 18 to 24″ is the biggest I see.
I don’t think I actually mentioned earlier, this was a great article, by the way! 😀
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Thankyou! That is such a shame about Toblerone. It always ruins products when these things happen. I’ve never bought any Cadburys since that cheapo-dodgy American outfit bought them and decided to fiddle with the location and the recipe. About the giant chocolate, that’s difficult to explain but it was specially made for a rather rich university friends 21st birthday…. I am playing things down by saying rather rich 🙂
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