Leadville: A Biography of the A40

This chapter tells the story of Western Avenue, just after the Hoover Building on the A40 into London, in Leadville: A Biography of the A40 (2000) by Edward Platt. It begins with Western Avenue's more recent history by discussing a failed plan to widen the road in the mid-1960s and the homeowners who had to experience the process first-hand. But the book, as the chapter shows, is also very much concerned with the human element of Western Avenue, and contains various interviews and histories from the residents themselves. To that end, Western Avenue emerges not just as an isolated disaster-area but as a microcosm of modern England, congested, polluted, mismanaged, and fixated on the past. It is also a story about the end of the automobile age, and the ways that the car has proved more destructive of human habitats than any plague in history.