London Calling - the difficulties of an F1 London Grand Prix

Back when I was a slip of a lad, as someone who a) was even then an F1 obsessive beyond redemption and b) lived near Edinburgh, I took it upon myself to map a potential F1 circuit around Edinburgh's city centre.

Beautiful thing it was too, starting and finishing on the famous Princes Street, taking in the Royal Mile and other well-kent Auld Reekie landmarks and - perhaps adding a touch of the old Nurburgring - having Edinburgh Castle as the circuit's centre piece. Scenic, devilishly undulating and with some spell-binding fast sections. It would have been a Montjuic for the new age.

The idea of a London Grand Prix refuses to go away
By Debot at Dutch Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3219015

And yet... Perhaps even then in my youthful idealist state somewhere in a dim mental recess I knew it wasn't plausible, even though the wonderful oddball of the F3000 Birmingham Superprix around part of downtown Brum existed at roughly the same time. A flipside of my track's spell-binding fast sections is that they'd have been unlikely to pass safety standards even then - for example at the end of Princes Street with cars pushing 200 mph presumably there was a quick right-left with Calton Hill on one side and a sheer drop on the other to gather anyone who got it wrong. Then there's that very same Royal Mile, which if you've ever visited you'll know is rather narrow, has buildings tightly packed on either side and much of its surface is cobbled... As I grew older and more hard-bitten plenty of other good reasons why all this would never happen seeped into my consciousness too.

But it's good to know I'm not alone when it comes to this sort of fantasising, as well as that such pursuits are not beyond some those of who are all grown up. The concept of a London Grand Prix, perhaps as a street race, is one that despite everything refuses point blank to desist, and it has been that way for years. As Joe Saward reckoned, "about once every two years there is a story about the possibility of a Grand Prix on the streets of London and people ask daft questions about whether it could happen..."

Perhaps it's understandable though, given that more than once just at a point when you hadn't heard about the idea in a while with perfect timing something has come along to give the whole matter the renewed urge that Saward described, jolting it all right back into full vigour.