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What he discovered makes extraordinary reading. He takes us on two parallel journeys, the first of which I have to admit I enjoyed most. He meets the people who live beside Western Avenue and explores their memories of life beside the road - once a wide boulevard with almost no traffic - and their feelings in the face of a bureaucracy about to demolish their homes to widen the road. Platt never intrudes or judges; he simply tells their stories, and every one is incredibly moving. It's easy to assume that anyone who lives beside a road that brings 18 million cars a year right past your house (as one character calculates) would be desperate to move, but as we get to know the characters it becomes very clear that it's not that simple. When we realise that a change in transport policy means the road will not, in the end, be widened it's hard not to become angry.
As we journey to the pointless destruction of people's homes, Platt's other journey is a fascinating history of the automobile age: we learn about the history of the road itself, and how many of the dreams of our age have grown - and died - around the motor car.
I loved this book. It is much more than the biography of one of London's arterial roads. It's hard to describe the scope of it, and especially hard to describe the warmth of it. It's a wonderful and very unusual book and it's beautifully written. Buy it!
Leadville is written in a kind of note form which serves to mesh the stories together underlining the tangled relationships shared between the city, people, road and car. Platt's background as a journalist makes for entertaining reading and he also presents the academic snippets without the dryness that can sometimes accompany that sort of material. In short definately a good read for anyone with an interest in the city, planning, the car or the suburbs. I would however, have liked a few pictures or even maps/illustrations of the road to illustrate how the plans and reality of the road had changed over the course of it's life.
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