The 'sweet little Chiswick Flyover' hits 50

Nick Curtis
1 Oct 2009

It's one of the stranger manifestations of civic London pride.

Fifty years ago, the voluptuous Hollywood bombshell Jayne Mansfield, clad in "a skintight crimson dress", used a pair of gold scissors to open the Chiswick Flyover, London's first two-level highway.

This week, actress and long-term local resident Imogen Stubbs was invited by the mayor of Chiswick, Paul Lynch, to take part in a ceremony to celebrate the flyover's half-century.

Pride in this enduring engineering marvel is tempered by a very British ambivalence. "I'm not exactly the natural successor to Jayne Mansfield," says Stubbs wrily.

"I think they asked me because, like the flyover, I'm homely and getting on a bit."

Lynch is similarly equivocal: "The flyover is a monument to the way our views have changed," he says. "It symbolises a rush to modernity, a belief that things would get bigger and better.

The flyover raised the curtain on the motoring age, and we're now dealing with that legacy: we let a lot of genies out of bottles back then."

The £6 million, half-mile flyover was built to ease congestion from the 40,000 cars then using the Chiswick roundabout, where the North and South Circular Roads meet. Tenants and stallholders were evicted, gas mains and sewers rerouted.

The stipulation that traffic be kept moving during construction led to tensions between contractors Alderton's Construction and transport minister Harold Watkinson.

There were rumours that victims of the Kray brothers, including Ginger Marks who shot Jack "The Hat" McVitie, were interred among the 100-tonne concrete support columns.

The showbiz opening on 30 September 1959 was therefore a shrewd publicity stunt by Alderton's managing director, J E Dayton. It worked.

The bosomy Mansfield - who was filming Too Hot To Handle with Christopher Lee in nearby Borehamwood - drew wolf whistles from the workmen, petted Dayton's bulldog, and declared the flyover "sweet".

Not everyone approved. In the House of Lords, Lord Windlesham questioned the rightness of having a British road opened by an American actress "who is not exactly famous but who, I suppose, can at least be described as prominent".

Dayton responded that he'd approached pukka British drivers Donald Campbell and Stirling Moss, but both had declined.

Although the flyover initially eased congestion, and in 1964 became part of the M4, it was dogged by accidents.

In 1969 the flyover was dubbed the most dangerous road in Britain, and in the mid-Nineties an accident was caused by a swan which mistook the wet flyover for a river and crash-landed into traffic. In 1995, it was discovered that chlorine from de-icing salts sprayed on the surface had corroded steel reinforcement bars.

Yet the flyover is still there, still winging 97,000 vehicles a day into London or out towards Heathrow. Imogen Stubbs grew up on a houseboat in Chiswick, and now lives there with her husband Sir Trevor Nunn.

Returning from childhood holidays along the M4, the sight of the now-vanished illuminated Lucozade sign, and the three-part roadside graffito "Good Morning Lemmings!", meant she was near the flyover and near home.

In adult life she's used the road when flying off to acting jobs, or ferrying her son to school in Oxford, or simply just to get about west London.

At yesterday's commemorative ceremony, Stubbs unveiled a plaque to Mansfield's memory, and repeated the bombshell's words: "It's a sweet little flyover." A tree was planted to commemorate the builders.

"There's something very sweet and eccentrically British about celebrating unsung heroes, like the creators of the flyover," says Stubbs.

"Having it there has hugely convenienced my life. I have never thought of it as a thing of beauty before. I shall think of it differently in future."