Automotive

A grand south western approach road from London to Basingstoke and Southampton: the A316 was entangled in local politics, and the M3 was never to enter London at all.

Serving Reading, Bristol and South Wales, the A4 and M4 are one of London's most important approaches. But the wildest fantasies of the sixties couldn't overcome its trickier problems.

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.

Its first section opened in 1973, and the rest was all built, but the A41(M) doesn't exist. It was canned in favour of orbital roadbuilding, and later resurrected in a more modest form.

Some of London's busiest roads head for points west. The Western Radials of the Ringway plan would have been expanded versions of those roads, though not all the upgrades and additions were what you'd expect.

In the 1960s, the road to the Essex coast and the heavy industry of the Thames Estuary might have spawned a motorway - but nothing is certain.

First conceived in the 1940s as a replacement for a road barely twenty years old, the M12 was a fast route from London out towards Essex. It was never built.

1960s plans for the motorway to Stansted and Cambridge kept shifting course, and its brutal extension to Central London never saw the light of day.

The A10 provides a road north from London in what would otherwise be a huge gap between the A1 and M11. But 1960s planners could find no way for it to reach Central London.

Filling a gap in North London's road network, and potentially relieving two of London's existing major roads, this elusive motorway proposal never got beyond the ideas stage.

The Great North Road was only ever going to play a walk-on part in London's proposed urban motorway network.

The main road north from London is missing the connections that would have integrated it with London's planned urban motorways.

The Northern Radials of London's unbuilt urban motorway plan would have smoothed stressful journeys to the capital and bridged gaps in the city's road network.

A fast route through Hertfordshire and Essex, linking provincial towns far from the fringes of London, the North Orbital would have brought new opportunities to Hatfield, Hertford and Harlow but wasn't much of a London orbital.

Its planners did not suspect that this length of orbital motorway would one day be the busiest in the UK. In fact, if there's anything wrong with it, it's that it's a bit too useful.

Rolling through Kent and Surrey, somewhere between leafy London suburbia and the North Downs, the proposed South Orbital Road would carry long-distance traffic between the Channel ports and the west.

The outermost of London's proposed ring roads, Ringway 4 would have run far from the City, avoiding London and linking towns on the fringes of the metropolis.

Ringway 3's western section threaded its way through outer London suburbia. A line was set for this road in the 1940s, but the question of where it would run could seemingly never be settled.

Sweeping through the suburbs from east to west, the southern side of Ringway 3 would have been enormously destructive and intrusive, and yet - oddly - it was never the subject of much protest.

The Eastern Section of Ringway 3 was built and opened in its entirety: we know it as the east side of the M25. The inevitable question is: was that it?

The northern side of Ringway 3 presented few problems - that's why almost all of it exists today, and it was a bit of a struggle to not build the part that's missing.

Of the four rings planned around London, Ringway 3 was the one that almost everybody could agree on. So why was only half of it ever built?

A short connection in London's never-built Ringway network with a surprisingly complicated history and a critical role to play.

A critically important link in London's proposed urban motorway network - but fierce opposition from the locals made the authorities scared to ever reveal its route.

This was the most controversial section of London's planned orbital motorways, and the one over which the most visceral battles were fought between planners and the public.

The east side of Ringway 2, one of London's planned orbital motorways, is a road of two halves: one still discussed today, too important to cancel and yet impossible to build, the other so straightforward that it's been open to traffic for years.

1960s plans to upgrade the North Circular Road to form one of London's motorway "Ringways" would have seen it change out of all recognition.

Ringway 2 was the 1960s plan to replace London's North and South Circular Roads with a new four-lane motorway.

One of the oddest motorway proposals in the London Ringway plans, the Balham Loop appears to be utterly redundant. It was killed off at an incredibly early stage, and little is known beyond its route.

With its busy market, narrow shopping streets and throngs of pedestrians, Camden Town is not an ideal environment for road traffic. With Ringway 1 came a plan to provide this inner London town centre with a bypass.