Town Planning

In 1918 the road system and housing pattern in Leicester was almost completely Victorian, with a medieval street pattern in the centre of the town. We have looked at the need to build houses and relieve the conditions of the slums in our housing section, so this page looks at the efforts to accomodate traffic. 

In 1918, one other thing was clear: the motor car was here to stay. The debate about how to cope with increasing traffic in the town began during the First World War. In the early 1920s Councillor Arthur Wakerley wrote several articles about the city’s new ‘Reconstruction Plan’ and the optimistic tone of these articles, which detailed the new roads and housing estates that were to be built, can be gauged from his assertion that, ‘Leicester is going to be made a new Jerusalem coming down from Heaven.’ However, the plan was rejected on grounds of cost.

By 1920 the most congested streets were Granby Street, Gallowtree Gate, and Belgrave Gate, all of which carried through the centre of Leicester traffic between London and places to the north and north-west of the town. In 1920 a joint report by two committees of the corporation advised that these streets should be widened. This proposal would have involved the destruction of many valuable buildings on the city's main streets and it was not carried out. Instead a more far-reaching plan to construct several new routes in the city centre by widening some existing streets and by constructing new ones was put forward.(1)

In fact, only Belgrave Gate was widened, although Leicester did open a '£1 million street' in 1932 - Charles Street - to alleviate the traffic congestion around the clocktower (see this Leicester Mercury article for photos of the opening of Charles Street). Further plans for the road system were drawn up in the Leicestershire Regional Planning Report of 1932. 

By 1938 the book, 'Civic Affairs', created by the City's new Publicity & Development Committee - itself, a response to the rise in tourism caused by increasing car ownership - detailed everything that the Corporation (the Council) was doing and planned to do in the City. The following extract illustrates the plans for a central ring road, new car parks (look for the car park that eventually became Lee Circle in the 1960s), a new omnibus station (St Margaret's), a scheme to widen the Melton Road, and photos of the widened Belgrave Gate.

If you looked at the photo of the plan to widen Melton Road in the above, you will have noticed the 9 foot wide cycle lane on each side. Between 1934 and 1940 Britain’s Ministry of Transport paid local authorities to install cycle tracks. About 100 schemes were built, resulting in more than 200 miles of innovative-for-the-time protected cycle tracks. The great majority were built – 9-ft wide and both sides of the roads – next to the new bypasses of the era; a few were built on “trunk roads” through residential areas. This has been researched by Carlton Reid. You can read more about this on this Bike Boom website, from which the information above was taken. There is also an interactive map of known cycle paths. In 2024, Leicester City Council mentioned this in plans to improve cycle provision on the Melton Road.

An important event was the extension of the city boundary in 1935. The new suburban housing estates were pulling the population away from the city centre and an agreement was made between the City and the County. The complete civil parishes of Gilroes and Braunstone Frith, large parts of the parishes of Evington, Humberstone, Braunstone, Leicester Frith, New Parks, and Beaumont Leys, and smaller portions of the parishes of Anstey, Birstall, Thurmaston, and Kirby Muxloe were brought within the City. By these changes the area of the City was increased from 8,582 acres to 16,977 acres, and its population increased from 241,000 to 261,000.(2)

What happened next?

While WW2 stopped the house and road building programmes, the planners were still at work. The City Engineer and Surveyor, John Beckett, wrote the 1944 development plan, which was shown in an exhibition at the museum on New Walk. After the war, in 1947, town development plans became mandatory under the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, and the Council’s Publicity and Development Committee published the booklet Leicester of the Future. This is taken up on the Post War Leicester website.

References

(1) British History Online: The City of Leicester

(2) Quoted directly from British History Online.