In the 1920s, the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, funded by a car producer, dreamed of sweeping away the boulevards of Paris and replacing them with sixty storey concrete towers, zoned by class and linked by fast roads in open parkland. It never happened.

In 1944 Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan proposed five ring roads for London (including the inner ‘Motorway Box’) and the resettlement of half a million people, including 40 per cent of the East End, to new ‘satellite towns.’ It never happened.

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