Over the weekend a lot of Weak Bridge signs have appeared along Stratford High Street due to imminent roadworks. Unusually the bridge in question isn't over a river or a railway, it's over a sewer. And annoyingly for anyone affected, the diversion's really long and expected to last for 30 months. [details]
The Northern Outfall Sewer is over 150 years old but still utterly crucial for spiriting away north London's effluent. Eight pipes 1.6m high and 2.4m wide pass underneath the High Street on their way to Beckton sewage works but are now in need of repair, hence the need for lengthy engineering works beneath the roadway. A weight limit of 7.5 tonnes has been introduced, which is good news for cars and vans but seriously bad news for trucks and lorries. Rest assured that fire engines, TfL buses and the A9 coach to Stansted Airport have been given an official exemption, otherwise bus travel in East London might have been seriously buggered.
This is a really awkward spot for a road closure because the River Lea has ridiculously few crossing points, especially for drivers of HGVs. Block off Stratford High Street and you create a three mile long gap, all the way from Temple Mills Bridge (north of the Olympic Park) to East India Dock Road (at Canning Town). As a result the official diversion for those trying to drive a heavy load from the Bow Roundabout to Stratford town centre (pictured above) is 4½ miles long rather than the usual not-quite-one, and looks likely to be in place until 2024.
Heading east along Bow Road, big blue signs now warn HGV drivers to go via the roundabout and not over the flyover. To make the point the flyover has been narrowed using plastic barriers to introduce a superfluous width restriction. This is bad news for cyclists who choose to use the flyover to skip the dangerous roundabout because the flyover's probably now more dangerous... and will be for the next 30 months. Once you reach the slip road the wording on the blue sign changes to advise you to travel via the A12 instead, and eventually a yellow sign tells you to turn left onto the A12 rather than right.
Should you choose to ignore the first signs and enter Stratford High Street anyway, or in case you arrived via a different route, further blue warning signs appear. No width restriction can be added here because HGVs need to be able to access building sites, waste depots and aggregate mountains on this side of the Greenway, of which there are several. Also the blue signs can no longer advise you to take the A12 (because that's behind you) so the next tells you to take Marshgate Lane and the next advises you to take the A112 (which I genuinely don't understand because it's all on the other side of the sewer). Expect a penalty from the cameras if you decide to ignore the lot and plough on.
Mention of Marshgate Lane piqued my interest because it is the only other possible road across the Lea hereabouts. Drive your HGV up Marshgate Lane past Pudding Mill Lane DLR, turn right into Sidings Street and you could be back at Stratford High Street in only a mile. That's what I believed anyway, but when I walked round and checked I discovered no right turn is allowed into Carpenters Road and there's a 7.5t limit under the railway, so no. An even more contorted wiggle via the Aquatics Centre would do it, but I can see why nobody wants to divert HGVs round here. The Greenway roadworks really are in an astonishingly awkward location.
In the process of researching all this I discovered that Newham council's website has a really useful roadworks page with a map showing all the latest lane closures, utility incursions, LTN blockages, diversions, one-way streets and nasty incidents. These even come with dates, where known, which in the case of the weak bridge extends to 30th April 2023. Tower Hamlets has one too and so does Waltham Forest, and it turns out they're all piggybacking on a service provided by one.network, a road disruptions start-up headquartered in London and Lisbon. They also provide information for Google and TomTom, which is how their 12-step Stratford diversion ends up in the cabs of affected lorries and sends them like sheep on a 4½ mile safari. I also note that the new Non-Executive Director of one.network is Leon Daniels, former Managing Director of TfL Surface Transport, so this is very much a company intending to go places (even if you can't).
TfL host a separate site called London's register of roadworks, which I tried out to see if it recognised the Stratford gap and it didn't. It also presented me with a streetmap circa 2006, which in Stratford's case meant it still had the original pre-Olympic road network so was utterly incomprehensibly useless. Much more promising if you're a trucker is the London Lorry Control Scheme map on the London Councils website which shows the Excluded Route Network, a set of roads along which vehicles over 18 tons can travel without seeking permission. I note that the Stratford High Street diversion is the shortest possible ERN route, accommodating loads of all sizes, hence why everyone gets sent via Hackney Wick and the heart of the East Village.
Anyway, if you are in charge of a large vehicle try not to nip between Bow and Stratford for the next 30 months because you won't be able to. Just be warned that when Thames Water repaired the section of sewer immediately to the north in 2016 it took three years before the Greenway was reopened rather than the anticipated two, so this mess might still be creating a fuss beside the Olympic Park when the next Olympics come round.
