It’s been named checked by The Clash, used as a backdrop by The Jam, and features in the title of the Don Letts Clash film “Westway to the World”. So why all the fuss about a road?
Erected in the late 1960s, The Westway was the brutalist’s answer to London’s increasing traffic congestion, and part of a much wider plan to impose similar multi-lane, arterial roads across much of central London. The Westway itself is two and a half miles of concrete supported by giant columns, which were bored into the bedrock of the surrounding neighbourhoods.
The proposed new over-head section of road, was extremely unpopular with local residents who saw no place for a new 6 lane motorway, thundering past and over, their mainly Victorian terrace houses, and they formed a staunch campaign group in an attempt to halt its construction.
A few years later, during the long hot summer of 1976, as the Notting Hill carnival passed under its landscape blotting span, the carnival spiraled into a riot, not a race riot but a new kind of riot, where the enemy was now the state, and the state were the police.
This was happening less than half a mile from both the childhood home of Clash guitarist Mick Jones and the squat of singer Joe “Woody” Strummer in nearby Walterton Road. In a way the Westway continues to symbolise grassroots campaigns, heavy handed government policy, and town centre brutalist planning.
The Clash “London’s Burning” – “I’m up and down the Westway, in and out the lights. What a great traffic system, it’s so bright. I can’t think of a better way to spend the night, than speeding around underneath the yellow lights.”
The cover to the Jam’s second LP “This is The Modern World” features a photo of the band pictured under the Westway.
The road is also name checked by Scritti Politti in “28/8/78”, and the Blur song “For Tomorrow” – “London’s so nice back in your seamless rhymes, But we’re lost on the Westway”, and also stars in its own dedicated Blur track “Under the Westway”
In the 2000s, a subway under the Westway at the Edgware Road crossing where Joe used to busk, was re-named the Joe Strummer subway.
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