Unbuilt

Underways

Proposed at the same time as the Ringways, but ten times as ambitious - and to think the government considered building them both!

Histories

EuroRoute

Today you can catch a train to France. You can even put your car on it, and be there in less than an hour. But in the 1980s, Euro Tunnel had competition - including plans to build a motorway across the English Channel.

Histories

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.

Routes
M62
Histories

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.

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From War to Worboys

The tale of how British traffic signing developed between the Second World War and the mid-1960s, bringing us from a system designed at the turn of the century to the signs we still use today.