If you use the area, you might have noticed building works at the road junction outside Holborn tube station. What looks like a simple exercise in widening the congested pavements a bit is part of a much larger project to improve the streets for pedestrians across the wider area.
Most significantly at this junction though, they aren’t just widening the pavements, but introducing what they call a “super crossing” — very similar to the one at Oxford Circus (and yes, at other places as well).
The X-crossing will help remove one the big problems with the Holborn junction, in that it can be very slow to navigate your way across, especially if going from the north-west to south-east sides as the road traffic lights are synced in a way that makes the crossing quite tedious.
The building works are now underway, as regular commuters will have noticed, probably snarling at the disruption.
Give it a few months though, and that fairly annoying road junction should be a lot less irritating to cross.
Elsewhere, works to pedestrianise Museum Street, add cycle lanes to Theobalds Road and widen the pavements around Kingsway and Southampton Row.
They’re also exploring partial pedestrianisation of the section of road directly outside the British Museum, and also unspecified plans to do something with the Kingsway Subway.
All they need to do to make it perfect is drop that awful “BeeMidTown” branding for the area.
These works will be welcome especially for cyclists and pedestrians at a junction that has a history of fatalities with pedestrians vulnerable on tiny islands when crossing the road, I have crossed here many times especially many decades ago when I worked on High Holborn.
However, High Holborn has suffered recently from major cuts to its bus services by Mayor Khan with routes 25 and 242 day time services withdrawn leaving just routes 8 and Mon-Fri single deck 521 and yet the promised Crossrail/ Elizabeth Line and pedestrianised Oxford Street have not occurred meaning passengers with disabilities are turfed out of major bus route 25 well short of Oxford Street meaning it’s better too go to Westfield, Stratford instead !