‘Highline’ for London?

NEW York was by no means the first city to develop a linear urban park based on an old railway line. Paris has that accolade (see panel), but the New York High Line has become a major tourist attraction in a short period of time, and has inspired similar projects all around the world. The 500-metre-long Sydney ‘Goods Line’ project, which opened in August 2015, also took inspiration from the longer 1.45-mile-long New York High Line.

The New York High Line was built from the 1920s by the New York Central Railroad to replace a street-level route that ran along Manhattan’s 10th Avenue on the city’s West Side, then home to wharves and warehouses and the city’s main meat processing industry, which exported around the world from the nearby docks. The street-level railway was busy, but accidents between trains and people were so common (more than 540 people had been killed by trains by 1910 alone). So in 1924 the city authorities required the New York Central to put the railway on elevated viaducts above the streets. Other cities, notably Chicago, had taken similar steps earlier in the century and seen accident rates decline.

West Side

The West