The ghost junction

The UK's only motorway that didn’t meet an ordinary road finally got its own interchange in 2019. But it's not open, because it doesn't go anywhere. Welcome to the M49's ghost junction.

Opened in 1996, the M49 has spent quarter of a century being the only British motorway without any junctions and the only one in the UK that didn’t touch the ordinary road network at any point. It met the M4 at one end, the M5 at the other, and had no way on or off between those points. But in 2019, a new interchange was completed, M49 junction 1. It ticks almost all the boxes.

✓ Full access to the north and south
✓ Built to full motorway standards
✓ Ideally located to serve the large industrial and distribution sites at Avonmouth
✓ Clearly signposted from both directions on the M49
✗ Connected to any other roads at all

Almost all the boxes.

The idea was that Highways England (as it was then called) would build it, while South Gloucestershire Council would then work with the developers of the adjacent distribution park to build the link road leading to it, as part of the agreement for the development to go ahead.

Highways England spent £50m of public money and, over two years, built the junction. But we're still waiting for the link road. In the meantime, Avonmouth is home to a very strange thing: a whole motorway junction, complete in every detail, with no road in or out. We thought it was time to have a look.

Ghost tour

Find your way to the Central Park business estate in Avonmouth and the new motorway junction isn't hard to find. You just follow the sign pointing towards the M49. It's here, at the Goldcrest Way roundabout, gesturing across a patch of scrubby brownfield land towards the motorway. This is where the unbuilt link road will start.

You can also find it from the M49, of course, but you won't be able to reach it since the sliproads are blocked by lines of concrete barriers. All the signs exist - you can see the backs of some of them here - but are obscured by black coverplates. They're likely to signpost the exit for Avonmouth (A403), but that can't be confirmed until the covers come down.

Since we can't get there from the motorway, let's follow the path from Goldcrest Way instead. A shared footpath, cycleway and bridleway crosses the M49 at the new junction - in fact, it always did, and the junction incorporates the bridge that was provided for it when the motorway was built. Once you get up close you can see the stub for the other end of the link road which stops, rather improbably, in mid air.

The path passes under the roundabout and then climbs up to bridge level with an unusual looped ramp.

From up here, the view from the stub of link road shows just how absurdly close the junction is to reaching Goldcrest Way and the rest of the business park. The gap between them is just 150m (490ft).

It's worth acknowledging the innovative way this junction was built. Rather than a traditional sloped embankment, the roundabout and sliproads are supported on retained banks. They're built of earth, like an ordinary embankment, but packed tightly and built almost vertically upwards, with the surface held together by two layers of wire mesh. Over time the surface will be populated by grass and other wild plants, which are already beginning to take hold; that will stabilise them and prevent the soil eroding away.

This method of construction was partly chosen to keep costs down, but it also serves to minimise the weight placed on the very soft ground underneath. The new bridge, on the north side of the junction, is fairly low cost too; it has just one span to cross the motorway and rests on walled embankment at each side so it's as short as possible. The walls overhang the edges of the earth banks, which looks odd now but will be less so when the banks are covered with vegetation.

The south side of the roundabout is carried by a bridge of a completely different style, made up of three spans supported by ordinary sloped embankments. It's original to the M49.

At the other side of the junction, there's another stub of road that ends in mid air. Some warehouses have started appearing on the east side of the M49, so this will presumably be connected to a further expansion of the distribution park into the fields visible here.

When it opened in 1996, the M49 was effectively just a set of extra-long sliproads between the M4 and M5; there were no intermediate junctions. The new interchange will change that, and end its claim to being the only UK motorway without any exits. It'll also end another related anomaly.

Sign me up

If you visit our Motorway Database pages, we start every page with the appropriate sign. On the M1 page, you'll see a blue sign at the top of the page with the motorway symbol and the number "M1". It's the familiar indication that you're joining a particular motorway.

At the top of the M49 page, you'll see the same blue sign, and the same motorway symbol, with the number M49. Nothing strange there, except that - because there has never been any way to join the M49 from outside the motorway network - that sign has never existed for real. It's the only UK motorway that could only be reached from other motorways, and that made it the only one without its own start-of-restrictions sign.

Well, now it has its own junction, and for the first time in its quarter of a century history, it has its own start-of-restrictions signs too.

There's two, one for each entrance sliproad. It rather feels like the M49 has finally come of age, graduating to become a real motorway in its own right and not the butt of road enthusiast jokes.

Or at least it will come of age, if the new junction ever opens.

Stuck in the works

Back when the junction was finished, South Gloucestershire Council stated that the link road was for the developers to build. That meant Severnside Distribution Land and Delta Properties, who own the land and are developing the estate of warehouse facilities. But they didn't.

News reports suggest there was some sort of dispute ongoing about who was liable to pay for it - and of course nobody would volunteer to pay if they thought it might be someone else's job. Delta Properties released a statement in early 2021 saying it had "no legal obligation" to pay for it. Perhaps what South Gloucestershire Council had was an informal agreement and not a contract. We may never know.

In February last year, the West of England Combined Authority said it had found £1m of public money to build the link. This was remarkable, first because the taxpayer had already paid £50m for the junction and the rest was supposed to come from someone else, and second because it suggested the price of the simple two-lane road would be more than £6,000 per metre - or, if you prefer, nearly £67 per centimetre.

Construction will not be simple, since this is a flood plain, and the embankment would have to spend the best part of a year settling before a surface could be laid. But that still seems pricey. Maybe the land, currently owned by the development companies, comes at a premium.

The latest change is that, in October last year, South Gloucestershire Council announced it had reached a "deal with the Government" to build the link, but refused to release any details of the deal, or its decision, or the confidential report it had commissioned into the matter. There has been no news since then. We don't know what the deal is.

As a result, we've no idea when the road will be built, or when the junction will open. The whole thing is bound up in secrecy. But if you want to go and see a ghost junction on the M49, now's your chance. Take a picnic if you like: even when the diggers arrive, you'll still have a year of embankment settling time before the delivery trucks can finally reach the motorway.