The result is an absorbing and pungent book about the A40, west of the Marylebone flyover to Hanger Lane via Gipsy Corner, and the people whose dreams of suburban happiness were ruined by traffic and planning blight. Platt sets the afflicted people against the city's long vacillation about the motorcar itself. Le Corbusier dreamt of the vertical city and Robert Moses, who thought of himself as New York's Baron Haussmann, destroyed great swaths to make way for urban highways. As he talks to the victims, Platt records not only anger but also stoicism and even a kind of heroism. In houses requisitioned for a road-rebuilding scheme, he discovers an often cheerful human flotsam.
Squatters burn fences to keep warm and dream of the next party.
The most complex character in Leadville is Robin, a town planner, whose professional detachment overcomes his sense of personal loss when he and his parents are forced to move from their house. The dislocation has been for nothing. In one of the closing scenes, Platt draws a savage little portrait of the implacably self-satisfied bureaucrat who has presided over the nightmare. The decision is merely, however, a truce, a lull. Local industrialists are already petitioning to revive the scheme.