A walk on the M621 14 July 2021
Fancy a stroll? In 1972, the City of Leeds was about to open its new South East Urban Motorway and proudly showed off the achievement with a "walkabout" event.
Yorkshire and the Humber
Surprise! A new motorway 11 May 2021
Appearing unexpectedly on signs in Lincolnshire last week, a brand new motorway has suddenly come into existence. And it's a weird one.
Routes
Burdock Way
The humble West Yorkshire town of Halifax may well be the creator of the most adventurous urban road scheme in the country. It's astonishing, but what was built isn't even the half of it.
Routes
Histories
Junction Three
The M621 has one junction where everything leaves the motorway and heads for the city, and a very bizarre junction it is too.
Routes
Scammonden Bridge
If you've ever been on the M62 across the Pennines, you'll know the one. It's the huge arched bridge 120ft above the road. And this is what it's like when you're standing on top of it!
Routes
M1-A1 Link Road
Those last few miles of the M1 east of Leeds were completed in 1999. It looks for the most part like a fairly average piece of road, but one of the project's engineers describes some of the challenges that were faced.
Tours
Bingley Relief Road
Most bypasses go around the town they relieve. Not so the Bingley Relief Road, which ploughs through the town centre instead.
Routes
Spontaneous Motorway
The unique and bizarre situation on the A1 Micklefield Bypass, West Yorkshire.
Routes
What's new
The road that made no sense
It was the UK's only single-carriageway motorway, and twenty years ago it ceased to exist. This is the story of the strange fascination it held, and of my place in history.
The forever bottleneck, part 2
The second part of the story, where we learn why exactly the M4 gets narrower on the final approach to Europe’s biggest city.
The forever bottleneck, part 1
The M4 into London was one of the UK's earliest and most ambitious motorway projects. It was bold, pioneering... and almost instantly regretted.
Have you seen...
Liverpool Inner Motorway
There's almost no evidence of Liverpool's 1960's plans for an inner ring road on the ground - but the motorway that never materialised would have been astonishing. The full details on the route, and the missing part the M62, are here.
