A465

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.

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The sunlit uplands 27 July 2025

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

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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.

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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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Have you seen...

B7076 and B7078

What sound at first like a pair of forgotten country lanes turn out to have had a major part to play in the history of Scotland's roads.