2013-03-22
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Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon and Clara Wong.
Axonometric maps revealing Hong Kong’s multi-layered elevated walkways, ramps, elevators and infrastructure interchanges. Definitely enbiggen.
(read more on the guardian and randomwire)
I love highwalks and axonometric diagrams, so of course I like this.
2013-01-31
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Michael Hebbert, in the A Walking Tour section of The City Of London Walkway Experiment.
Written in 1993, that’s just as true now; however, vast chunks of the system he describes are gone, including the bulk of the Liverpool Street - Leadenhall section.
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2012-03-11
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The area to the north of London Wall was almost completely levelled during the Blitz and was essentially a blank canvas for reconstruction… work that is still going on and if you know where to look there are still some bomb sites waiting for someone to come along and fill the gap.
For inspiration the planners looked to Stockholm where, in 1946, a plan had been tabled to create a similar business area consisting of a line of five Modernist ‘slabs’ in the Hötorget (Haymarket) area – each a curtain-walled office block and all of them aligned alongside an arterial road. By the time construction began in 1952 the plans dictated that each should be 18 stories high (with all surrounding buildings limited to two) and all be of a very similar design… each was worked on by a different architect but the limitations imposed by the city meant that they looked pretty much the same.
Key to the scheme was the addition in 1953 of a series of raised pedestrian walkways, complete with shops and connecting bridges… which for anyone who’s been along London Wall will sound spookily familiar to the desolate raised pedestrian areas in the vicinity. London’s planners wanted their own Hötorget and similar restrictions were placed on the architects – as with Stockholm five blocks were built (Moor House (1961), St Alphage House (1962) and Lee House (1962) to the North of London Wall, 40 Basinghall Street (1964) and Royex House (1962) to the South) and each looked almost identical apart from slight variations such as the colour of the strips along the bottom of the windows, although the windows themselves were all identically sized.
”2012-03-07
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2010-09-01
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“The BBC look at the development of The Barbican area in London and the future of housing and town planning.” Looking at London Wall (aka Route 11) as the 1960s start, complete with a mention of the highwalks. (via Phil Gyford)
2009-11-12
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The Living City, a 1970 promotional film from the City of London.
Highlights:
- middle managers running to distribute the changes in bank rates, at 7’
- at 8’30, the London Fur Auction (“turnover is between £30 and £40m”) and the PLA ivory warehouse (“a narwhal’s tusk used for the Bishop of Coventry’s staff”)
- two now-lost office schemes, at Tower Place and Paternoster Square, at 14’45.
- from 16’45, the Barbican, complete with a whole section on the highwalks, with the City “claiming to be pioneering total pedestrian traffic segregation in the world”
- Fleet Street, when it was still producing newspapers
- more demolished schemes- Fetter Lane, at 19’30; pieces in “a vast and highly complex jigsaw puzzle”
- ramjet engines at City University, at 25’
This is just one of the many (quite long) films that London’s Screen Archives have posted. I can sense a timesink looming.
2009-11-06
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2009-11-05
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“Nineteenth-century proposal for street bridges” (via antimega) - proto-highwalk?
2009-09-08
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Moorgate’s New Underground: poster 1983/4/7966 of the London Transport Museum collection, complete with high-level walkways. Here’s the artwork for the top third.
Designed by E. Barker, who also designed the Bond Street cutaway poster I posted last week.
