The Highwalk Bridge: Streets in the Sky

The John Wesley Highwalk at the Barbican in London is part of an ambitious 1965 plan for a 30-mile elevated city walkway, of which only a fraction was ever built. Named after Methodist founder John Wesley, who experienced a conversion on Aldersgate Street in 1738, the covered walkway features distinctive white round-arched roofs. Its elevated bridges were built specifically to clear double-decker buses passing beneath them.

London Β· from the walk β€œSecrets and Surprises of Barbican” Β· audio ~3 min Β· Generated

John Wesley Highwalk, Aldersgate Street, London EC2Y 8AX

What was the original 1965 plan for London's Barbican highwalk network?

Look up... because right now, you're standing on a dream that never quite came true. This is the John Wesley Highwalk, and beneath your feet is one of London's strangest secrets... a ghost of a city that was supposed to exist Entirely above ground.......... Why is it called John Wesley Highwalk? Well, right below us on Aldersgate Street is the spot where John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had his famous spiritual conversion on the twenty-fourth of May, seventeen thirty-eight. A memorial called the Aldersgate Flame was placed here in nineteen eighty-one, commemorating that moment.......... But the Real story of this walkway... is far more ambitious. After the Second World War, this area was the most heavily bombed part of the City, reduced to a sprawling labyrinth built above total devastation. And from that rubble, planners hatched an Extraordinary vision. In nineteen sixty-five, an obscure City of London Corporation document β€” mysteriously known as Drawing three four zero zero B β€” laid out plans for a Thirty-Mile network of elevated walkways stretching from Liverpool Street to the Thames, from Fleet Street to the Tower.......... Imagine it... an entire parallel London on the first floor. Every new building in the City was Required to include first-floor access to this pedway network as a condition of getting planning permission. But since most of the network was never built, this created bizarre dead spaces β€” walkways that led to Dead Ends, and ghost doorways opening onto nothing. Even the NatWest Tower had a pedestrian bridge across Bishopsgate that was never once used... and has since been demolished.......... At the height of their popularity, more than thirty miles of highwalks were being planned. In the end, only about One Tenth were actually built β€” and most of what survives is right here, at the Barbican.......... Now look at this walkway itself. The John Wesley and Seddon Highwalks are covered ways under distinctive white round-arched roofs. The bridges were built high enough to clear a London double-decker bus passing underneath on Aldersgate Street. That was the whole point β€” pedestrians up Here, traffic down There.......... And here's a detail most people miss. This highwalk terminates in a glazed brick service tower with rounded walls and a pyramidal roof β€” look for it at the Aldersgate end. It looks almost medieval, like a fortress turret. And that's no accident. The word Barbican comes from the medieval Latin "barbecana," meaning Fortress β€” and the architects deliberately designed these walkways to echo the feeling of a walled citadel.......... One enthusiastic council member, a Mister Deputy Alfred, declared at the time: "Once people were up on the walkways there was no need for them to come down at all β€” until they wanted to go home."

...... Well... the future didn't quite bless the court as they'd hoped. Escalating costs and the growing conservation movement eventually killed the grand plan. But standing here, on this surviving fragment of a parallel London... you can almost feel what might have been.

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