Westway, or The Westway is the main route from central London to the northwestern suburbs and beyond. It starts at the junction of Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road, and goes all the way to west Wales, as the A40 trunk road. Strictly speaking the name "Westway" only applies to the section between Marylebone and Acton, other parts being known by different names, such as Euston Road, Western Avenue, London Road, etc. However many people informally refer to the whole road as The Westway. The infamous Hanger Lane Gyratory System is its intersection with the North Circular Road, and it now merges with the M40 motorway beyond Northolt.
A notable landmark on Western Avenue at Perivale is the Art Deco Hoover Building, now a supermarket.
Other things named "Westway"
"Westway" was also the name of a proposed project to put New York City's West Side Highway underground, first planned in 1972 and officially canceled in 1985. It would have involved extensive landfill in the Hudson River off Manhattan to accommodate a highway and real estate development.
To its supporters, Westway was an opportunity tragically squandered, and the entire episode symbolizes the difficulty of building big projects in the city.
Whitaker attributes the failure of Westway to an anti-government attitude that was understandable considering that the "government had done many things rather badly" in the period leading up to Westway, including slum clearance, and a plan to build an expressway across Canal Street in Lower Manhattan.
Whitaker presented Westway before more than 700 community meetings, and found it hard to convey to people that plan was not the Lower Manhattan Expressway reincarnated along the Hudson.
Thirty years ago this spring, state and city engineers and planners proposed a six-lane highway, to be built mostly underground on 220 acres of new landfill in the Hudson River with 89 acres of parkland and about 100 acres of development on top.
He still believes Westway was a missed opportunity to create a vast amount of parkland at federal expense.
Whitaker thinks Westway would have had more accessible parkland than the current park proposal which includes some restored piers and the pierhead lines and some extremely narrow stretches with little more than a walkway and a bike path.
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