Jen Pedler tells the story of a notorious road junction and its tube station – the end point of her ‘Suburbs, Stations and Subways‘ walk.

The Hanger Lane gyratory system, where the North Circular Road meets the A40, was voted Britain’s scariest road junction in a 2007 survey by the Highway Insurance Company. Poorly signed, eight lanes wide in places and with up to 10,000 vehicles an hour using it at busy times, it’s certainly not for the faint-hearted!

But it wasn’t always this way. Hanger Lane began life as a quiet country road, wandering through fields between Alperton and Ealing. Its name is derived from the Old English word hangra, meaning wooded slope; the hilly area to the south-east of today’s junction was known as Hanger Hill and gave its name to two contrasting suburbs built there in the 1930s.

It was the expanding rail and road network that encouraged suburban development. First came the railway. In 1904 the Great Western Railway (GWR) built the New North Main Line towards High Wycombe approximately on the route followed by the Central Line today. A station, Twyford Abbey Halt, was built just to the east of today’s Hanger Lane Station and a bridge carried the road across the railway.

The next arrival was the Western Avenue (now part of the A40) in the 1920s. This was a major arterial road, built in sections, to link White City to Uxbridge; Hanger Lane was one of the first sections to be built. The road was routed to the south of the railway with a crossroads at Hanger Lane.

It soon became busier when, in 1928, the section of Hanger Lane running north of the railway was upgraded to an arterial route to connect Western Avenue to the Harrow Road (now the A4005) Two major arterial roads now converged at this formerly quiet crossroads.

Things became further complicated in 1936 when the North Circular Road was extended from Harlesden to connect with the A40. This new, fast, six-lane dual carriageway terminated at the Hanger Lane junction but the two-way, two/three lane section of Hanger Lane, leading to Ealing, south of the junction was also designated part of the North Circular. This created a bottleneck which still exists today.

The end result was a complicated 5-way junction, controlled by traffic lights, with the railway bridge as the critical link between three major arterial roads. A recipe for gridlock!

There was a partial solution in 1963 when the underpass routing the A40 beneath the junction was built. But although this improved things for through traffic the junction above was still a complex, congested crossing of two dual carriageways as slip roads were required for traffic joining or leaving the A40.

The gyratory as we know it today finally came into being in the late 1970s when a second railway bridge was built to form its western arm. Although gyratories are now going out of fashion – many including the Elephant and Castle, Archway, Highbury Corner and Old Street have been remodelled in the last few years – it’s hard to imagine a similar scheme being proposed for Hanger Lane so ‘malfunction junction’, as it has been dubbed, looks set to be with us for a while yet.

In the middle of all this mayhem, like a stranded spaceship, stands Hanger Lane Underground Station, built in 1947 when the Central Line was electrified and extended to West Ruislip. It ran along the route of the former GWR line and most of the GWR stations were closed at this time.

Although the station is above ground, passengers must access it via a network of subways radiating out to each corner of the gyratory. It’s fascinating to discover this underground world of pedestrians and cyclists – an alternative gyratory that the drivers above will be unaware of unless they also happen to have walked there…