Does Leeds have the UK's best ring road?
Explore the Leeds Inner Ring Road - one of the UK's first urban motorways and maybe the one with the best design.
Running through the city in a series of trenches and tunnels, it stays hidden out of sight and integrates with the street network in clever ways. Unlike major urban roads in London, Glasgow, Birmingham and Manchester, people don't complain about it much because it isn't as noticeable.
Filmed on 13 December 2003, the road might not be too different to the way it looks today, but the devil is in the detail. Twenty years ago you could still see the traces of a bold paint scheme in the Westgate Tunnel, and lots of the road's original backlit direction signs still survived - originally installed in 1964, but mostly now gone.
You might also like our guide to the Leeds Inner Ring Road.
Map extract from OS Opendata 1:250,000 Scale Colour Raster under the Open Government Licence 3.0.
What's new
Signs and sensibility
The one great attempt to make London’s streets logical - and how one retired chauffeur’s favourite routes changed the way you get around the capital.
A bridge under troubled bridges
A bridge that was ruined by another bridge, and a type of highway planning beyond any of the UK’s worst nightmares.
The monster seen from below
What might it have been like to stand in one spot and witness the arrival, and the uncertainty, of plans for an urban motorway in West London?
Have you seen...
M25 Orbital Motorway
The M25 is either one of the greatest transport achievements of the 20th century or one of Britain's largest planning failures, depending on which way you look at it. This booklet takes the former view, celebrating the completion of the circuit in 1986.
