The M271 shifts traffic around the west of Southampton, connecting the motorway to the western suburbs and the A33. It isn't a big job, and yet somehow the M271 gets it all wrong.
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.
During the 1960s the UK developed some of the most sophisticated - and strange - electronic variable message signs anywhere in the world. How? And, just as importantly... why?