Automotive

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.

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.