M25 motorway re-examined as a motorway route in Sir Charles Bressey's and Sir Edwin Lutyens' "The Highway Development Survey, 1937". Sir Patrick Abercrombie's "County of London Plan, 1943" and "Greater London Plan, 1944" proposed a series of five roads encircling the capital. The northern sections of the M25 follow a similar route to the World War II Outer London Defence Ring, a concentric series of tanks and pillboxes designed to slow down a potential German invasion of the capital. Little was done to progress these plans until the 1960s when the Greater London Council developed its London Ringways plan consisting of four
History of the London Underground of London and especially the Blitz led to the use of many tube stations as air-raid shelters, with 175,000 people arriving every night in August 1940. Six stations were breached by a direct hit, and in March 1943, 173 people died in a crowd crush accident at the unfinished Bethnal Green station. In the 1940s a depot built for the Northern line extension and an unfinished stretch of the Central line extension, the underground section between Newbury Park and Leytonstone, was turned into aircraft factory. The closed Brompton Road station was used as an anti-aircraft control room. The closed Down