A40

A465 and A40

Heads of the Valleys Road

Raglan to Neath

By turns ruggedly beautiful and grittily industrial, the newly-completed A465 Heads of the Valleys Road might be one of the UK's most surprising and satisfying expressways.

Routes

M50, A40 and A449

Strensham to Newport

Between them, the M50, A40 and A449 form a single dual carriageway route connecting the West Midlands to South Wales, incorproating one of the UK's oldest and most scenic motorways.

Routes

M40 and A40

It's one of London's most complete radial routes, but the road envisioned by sixties planners would have been bigger: perhaps a motorway, perhaps double-deck, perhaps not.

Routes

Out of London: A40 07 September 2018

The A40 travels more than 260 miles west from St Paul's Cathedral in London. This is what a journey along its whole route, from start to finish, looks like.

Routes
A40

Western Avenue Extension

The Western Avenue Extension - opened as A40(M) and known as the Westway - was much hated when it opened, but there's no sign of that in the official book published to mark its opening.

Routes

Oxfordshire Signs

This is the story of one man at Oxfordshire County Council who pre-empted the development of modern road signs - much to the annoyance of the men from the Ministry.

Routes
A40
Histories

What's new

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.

Hello, here's my ridiculous side project

An introduction to what I write, and why I write it, and where my strange new road sign simulator fits in to all this.

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Abbreviations

How do you describe a road? One way is to use these engineering abbreviations, much loved by the UK's community of road enthusiasts.