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
London Underground infrastructure lines share all their stations and most of the track with other lines. The Bakerloo, Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria and Waterloo & City lines are deep-level tubes, with smaller trains that run in two circular tunnels with a diameter of about , lined with cast-iron or precast concrete rings, which were bored using a tunnelling shield. It is these that were the "tube" lines, although since the 1950s the term "tube" has come to be used to refer to the whole London Underground system. Many of the central London deep-tube line stations, such as those on the Central and