Leadville: A Biography of the A40

by Edward Platt

"One afternoon in January 1995, as I drove along Western Avenue, I did what I had never done before: I parked the car in a side-street and walked on to the road..."

In "Leadville," Edward Platt tells the story of Western Avenue from the optimism of its construction in the 1920s to its partial demolition seventy years later. It is a tale of the city and the traffic, of suburbia and the dreams of its inhabitants, and of our senseless and all-consuming love affair with the motor car.

'Platt has created a drama that is not only Orwellian in its attention to what you might call the state of the nation . . . but almost Dickensian in the recording of the colour and pathos of its inhabitants' Tim Lott, "The Times"

'endlessly entertaining - an original talent and an excellent book.'
Norman Lewis

'A reporter of fearless imagination.' Simon Jenkins, The Times.

Leadville won a Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non Fiction.

Genres: London, Nonfiction

293 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

I have written three books: Leadville: A Biography of the A40 (Picador 2000), which won a Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was short-listed for two other awards; The City of Abraham (Picador, 2012); and The Great Flood: Travels through a Sodden Landscape (Picador 2019), which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week. I am a contributing writer at the New Statesman, and a regular contributor to other newspapers and magazines. I was born in Essex in 1968, and grew up in Hampshire, Northumberland, and the Wirral. I have lived in London since 1992.

Reviews

[Fred Langridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absorbing and readable journalistic book about Western Avenue, one of the big dual carriageways entering London from the west, the people who live and work along it and the effects on them of plans to widen the road.

It was recommended to me because I was going on about Concretopia - it's not as good as that but is interesting in the same way.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn't what I expected - but in a good way. Billed as 'A biography of the A40', I'd anticipated a story about the physical road itself, as in the making, maintaining and modifying of it over the years. A techie general read, if you will. But it is not that at all. What it is is a biography of the road as a place to live alongside, and once you read with that idea in mind, this book is both interesting and informative. The author interviews residents, squatters, and a delightful (on the page - I'd hate to actually meet the prat, though I've met too many like him over the years) bureaucratic bungler who never gives a straight answer. We discover how the road has changed over the years from a quiet place that people loved to live beside to a frenetic modern highway that - surprisingly - some people still love to live beside. The story of the trashing of once-beautiful homes to make way for a grand new road concept was very sad - but the futility of it all that we learn about later is worse. This is a good read and an important one, in that the author has captured the idiocy and sometimes inhumane treatment of ordinary people when infrastructure projects are foisted on local populations.

[Edmund Chattoe-Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

The reviews on the cover look ridiculous in their enthusiasm (and in some ways they are) but this book really creeps up on you and is a little gem. The subject matter sounds distinctively unpromising: Interviews with people who live on the section of the Westway that was gradually boarded up and demolished for road alterations which kept being postponed and amended. But Platt writes very well and the tone/organisation is very nicely judged so the interviews and associated observations of the area build up into both an effective psychogeography and microcosm of town planning and the rise and fall of our love affair with the motor car. Insets about Le Corbusier, the US parkway movement and the history of the Westway (which in some other books might just look like padding) really do round out the effectiveness of the present day account. Well worth your time.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've ever lived or worked in outer west London, this book explains why one of London's busiest and most polluted roads is lined by inter-war housing, creating one the city's most hostile landscapes. A mixture of history and reportage, it was written in response to the plan in the 1990s, later abandoned, to widen the A40 by demolishing the surrounding housing. This book deserves to be re-published, as it is as good as anything Iain Sinclair or Patrick Wright have written on similar themes.

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Totally enjoyed this authors writing. Thought the book would be absolutely boring, however really liked the way the book moved forward and unfolded. Made me appreciate peoples lives and also realise how important where we live is for all of us.

[Justin Cormack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful history book, the history of an urban road, and the story of the footbridge.

[Patrick Johns · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked because I know the Western Avenue so well!