Last Tuesday, 6 October 2015, I was a guest on Vanessa Feltz’s BBC Radio London show and talked about the politics of the city in 1970. Why that year? Because 6 October 1970 was the day the station was launched. To coincide with its 45th anniversary it reverted to its original name - having tried out various others down the years - and looked back to a time when London was very, very different and yet in some ways much the same.
The most striking difference politically was the strength of the Conservative Party at that time. Control of the Greater London Council (GLC), which was the capital’s strategic governing body of those days, had been won by a Tory landslide in 1967 under the leadership of Desmond Plummer, later Sir Desmond and then Lord Plummer of St Marylebone. That’s him in the video clip above, ushering in a new phases in the history of the Blackwall tunnel. All frightfully up-to-date. A plaque commemorates the occasion, if memory serves.
Three years on, in April 1970, Plummer led his party to a second successive GLC triumph - a feat no one else achieved- albeit by a smaller (if still comfortable) majority and on a rather sorry 35.2% turnout (it was 38.8% for the last mayoral election in 2012). The Tories took 65 seats out of 100, while Labour increased its presence in County Hall by 17 seats to 35, mostly gaining in what were then considered the predominantly working class areas of Camden, Greenwich, Hammersmith, Lambeth and Wandsworth. Imagine that.
Why were the Tories so strong during the period? The unpopularity of Harold Wilson’s Labour national government probably had something to do with it - the party’s partial recovery in the 1970 GLC ballot didn’t prevent Edward Heath becoming prime minister two months later. Maybe too the emptying out of London, in particular Inner London, affected the electoral landscape of those days.
The capital’s population had been in continuous decline since the war, especially in the smog-clogged, bomb-ravaged inner boroughs where Labour support was traditionally strong. Many of its people had migrated to the New Towns, in keeping with a national government policy which held that big cities were bad for you and that the future of urban living, including coveted modern housing with central heating and proper gardens, lay beyond the suburbs in the Home Counties.
But back to roads. As well as presiding over the expansion of the Blackwall Tunnel, Desmond Plummer oversaw the opening of the Westway flyover in July, 1970 and championed the idea of having concentric motorway ring roads built in Outer London to relieve traffic congestion, as well as others further out.
The plan would have entailed knocking down thousands of homes. It met with strong opposition. Among the fringe parties that contested the 1970 GLC election was one called Homes Before Roads. It got only 1.2% of the vote, slightly less than the Communist Party, which came fourth after the Liberals. But 24,000 Londoners ticked its box, and they were a sign of trouble to come. At the next GLC election in 1973, Labour, which had itself supported the ringways concept in 1967, declared it a “reckless and irrelevant Tory plan.” They won.
And today? Boris Johnson has unveiled a scheme for putting stretches of some London’s busiest roads underground. Again, the backdrop is the problem of road traffic congestion. Again, road-building, albeit of a subterranean kind, is seen as the solution. Draw your own conclusions.
