Three months of traffic misery

Central London ground to a standstill as the first day of a three-month programme of road closures in the heart of Westminster brought chaos.

Traffic was stationary today from Blackfriars underpass to Victoria Embankment, while the Mall, Birdcage Walk and Victoria Street were also gridlocked. Drivers attempting to avoid the congestion by diverting to the South Bank were also caught up as Westminster, Lambeth, Waterloo and Chelsea bridges were jammed.

Motoring organisations attacked the "idiotic" closure of Old Palace Yard, St Margaret's Street and Abingdon Street - a busy route linking congested Parliament Square with Millbank - and predicted it would cause "months of misery for commuters".

The resurfacing works, overseen by the Director of Parliamentary Estates, clash with the heaviest programme of roadworks the capital has seen; many of them scheduled by the Mayor's Transport for London office which is paving the way for the controversial £5-a-day congestion charge.

The scheme will last until 13 October - coinciding with a colossal and disruptive project to redevelop Trafalgar Square and Whitehall that will last until next summer. It also clashes with the major redevelopment of Vauxhall Cross less than a mile away.

Jonathan Simpson, of the RAC, said: "At a stroke they have shut one of the main arterial routes for anybody approaching London from the south of the city or some parts of the west.

"It will mean months of chaos for drivers and bus passengers."

Rebecca Rees of the AA said: "This is bad planning. When it is finished, no doubt motorists will have a nice new surface to drive on but they will have to put up with weeks of misery.

"The timing should certainly have been re-thought in the light of other roadworks." Taxi driver Stephen Conrad said he was appalled by the "insanity" of the programme of closures. "It took me 20 minutes to reach the Mall from Heathrow, but an hour to crawl along the Mall because of traffic backing up from Parliament Square. The whole area is at a standstill. All of Victoria Embankment westbound is a car park.

"It is absolute madness that these closures have been imposed on us when we are already suffering ongoing roadworks around Trafalgar Square and Whitehall."

Former Tory minister Lord Walker, who was caught in the jams as he travelled to the House of Lords, said the disruption should have been minimised. "The centre of London is being brought to a halt for three months - but the resurfacing could be finished in three weeks if they worked through the night and at weekends.

"Within hours of the closures this morning there were mile-long tailbacks, but as yet no work has started on site. It is madness."

Both the Trafalgar Square and Old Palace Yard schemes are part of the World Squares for All programme planned by a group of architects and professionals led by Sir Norman Foster. Today a spokesman for the House of Lords stressed that the project had been planned for years and that all highway authorities had been consulted, and permission for the works gained, well in advance.