M1 Hendon Urban Motorway

Published on 27 June 2018
Front cover of a booklet that has been made up to look like a blue motorway sign, with the text "Hendon Urban Motorway: Southern Extension of the M1"
Booklet published to mark the opening of the M1 Hendon Urban Motorway

The original length of the M1 ran from Watford, just north of London, to the A5 in Northamptonshire. During the 1960s it was progressively extended north to Yorkshire, but its southern end only made progress further towards London at the very end of the decade.

This booklet was published to mark the opening of the Hendon Urban Motorway, a scheme that carried the M1 south to reach Fiveways Corner, the junction of A1 and A41, just short of the North Circular Road. A further extension to reach the motorway's current southern terminus at the North Circular was added almost a decade later.

This book gives some insight into the planning and construction of an urban motorway that's usually forgotten when major urban roads are discussed, but which was no less disruptive and destructive than others. Running through the North London suburbs, it involved the demolition of rows of neat semi-detached houses, and what's perhaps most remarkable about this book is just how little interest it shows in the environment into which the new road was placed. There are photographs of nightshift engineering work with houses immediately behind, and a lot of detail on the construction of a retaining wall that avoided demolishing two further streets of houses - described in a way that suggests the engineers would rather have just rolled out the wrecking ball.

Routes
M1

Add new comment

About text formats

Restricted HTML

  • Allowed HTML tags: <a href hreflang> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote cite> <code> <ul type> <ol start type> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <h2 id> <h3 id> <h4 id> <h5 id> <h6 id>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
All comments posted to Roads.org.uk are moderated before appearing online. Your comment won't be visible immediately.

In this section

What's new

The sunlit uplands

On Saturday 31 May something historic happened. The Heads of the Valleys Road was finally complete.

Grand openings

Our much-loved Opening Booklets section has two new publications for you to explore, and we’re making some overdue changes to make them easier to find and easier to read.

Silver bullet

The Silvertown Tunnel is finally open for business. One question remains: what’s it for?

Share this page

Have you seen...

The Heads of the Valleys

The A465 Heads of the Valleys Road is one of the most spectacular trunk roads in the UK, and building it required some of the most remarkable civil engineering. This is the story of how the road was built in the 1960s, and how it's being rebuilt today.

About this page

Published

Last updated