Automotive

Thousands of vehicles travel the M6 between the M56 and M62 each day. They all cross the River Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal, and the bridge that carries them is notorious from travel reports nationwide. But what does it actually look like from the ground?

Taken over the course of two years, from 2002 to 2003, these sixteen images chart the construction of two new bridges alongside the M2 Medway Viaduct.

If you've ever been on the M62 across the Pennines, you'll know the one. It's the huge arched bridge 120ft above the road. And this is what it's like when you're standing on top of it!

The most unique motorway in Britain owes its identity to its fifties architecture. Much of it is in danger of being removed or irreperably altered. This page documents it in detail.

Pictures taken as the first section of the M1 was being built in 1958-9, with all its unique architecture still under construction.

The lowly and pathetic A6144(M) motorway was downgraded in May 2006. This is the story of the mission to rescue some memorabilia.

It makes the traffic situation in one part of West London much more bearable but it should have been removed more than quarter of a century ago. It's amazing what you can do with a big Meccano kit.

Go to Glasgow and it's almost inevitable that you'll use the M8. The views of the city surrounding it are really quite unique.

Manchester's highway in the sky, carrying traffic around the city centre and rapidly becoming an iconic part of the city's heritage.

The M621 has one junction where everything leaves the motorway and heads for the city, and a very bizarre junction it is too.

A peculiar road near Peterborough with an interesting history. And it's only a mile long.

Once it was one of the UK's most dangerous roads — just what is so special about a bit of dual carriageway in Surrey?

An unassuming Surrey market town with an amazing claim to fame — the world's first road tunnel.

The road that connects Wales together, but which nobody really uses... All five hours of the A470, from Llandudno to Cardiff, are here.

Today two motorways cross the Severn near Chepstow. But as recently as 1965, the only crossing was a ferry that carried six cars at a time, from Aust to Beachley.

It crosses cattle grids and untamed moorland, it climbs 1-in-4 hills and plummets through hairpin bends, it runs single-track through woodland and historic villages. It's rugged and beautiful. Is it really the A39?

The UK's biggest "shared space" is a phenomenally expensive experiment in West London. How does it work?

The unloved and unfinished Gateshead Highway is due to be demolished. Take a look at the road that Gateshead can't wait to get rid of.

The UK's widest motorway is not where you might expect to find it — in fact, it's on the unassuming M61 near Manchester. This gallery offers an overhead view of one of the UK's most unique and spacious interchanges.

The annual London Pride event was accompanied, in 2016, by some quite unusual changes to traffic lights around Trafalgar Square. The green men went missing — and seven new symbols took their place.

London's ancient main road to Canterbury and Dover has been bypassed over and over again, and in the sixties was supposed to be replaced in part with an urban motorway. Parts were finished in the end, even if they weren't quite to the original designs.

It might have been the least noticed and least controversial of London's urban motorway plans, a collection of odd jobs and quick wins. But most of it was never built.

One of the oldest ideas in the urban motorway plan, and one of the lowest priorities, Parkway E would have been a brand new motorway from Central London to the south.

It might be the most obviously unfinished motorway in the whole UK, let alone in London. The M23 was supposed to link London with Crawley - but its urban section was a problem that couldn't be solved.

The A3 has been one of London's most important approaches for centuries. Planned upgrades in the sixties were almost all built, but not quite, making a very fast road that fizzles out at Wandsworth.

South London is a problem. Travel by road is always slow and always difficult. London's urban motorway network was supposed to fix that.

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.