Twists and turns in the Taff Valley
Built in the 1970s, the A470's high speed expressway down the Taff Valley to Cardiff swings you around endless corners as it finds its way through towns, villages, steep wooded hillsides, railways, rivers and bridges.
This video was filmed on 20 June 2009. The A470 hasn't changed dramatically since then, but fifteen years ago it did still have some of its original seventies features - most noticeably all those huge streetlights painted pastel green.
Our guide to the A470 is in the Motorway Database.
Map extract from OS Opendata 1:250,000 Scale Colour Raster under the Open Government Licence 3.0.
What's new
The road that made no sense
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.
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.
Have you seen...
West Cross Route
Desperately-needed but never built, this was one of the only London urban motorway plans that were ever progressed to the construction stage.
