The matter of roads

I have now looked into the matter of roads, mentioned near the beginning of the last post, reference 1, using a mixture of the Ordnance Survey and Wikipedia. That is to say, I knew all about A1 thru A5, the original, radial trunk roads from London. But what about A10 through A50, the next tier down?

It turns out the the A10 is something of an exception, still running more or less from the southern outskirts of Kings Lynn all the way down to London Bridge. The A20 joins the A2 at Deptford. The A30 joins the A4 at Hounslow West, a junction which used to be important to me as the best place that I knew to start hitching from London to the west country, a method of travel which was still entirely practicable in my student days: reasonably fast and very cheap. Getting badly stuck was rare. The A40 makes it all the way to Paddington Station, where it becomes the A501, which runs across the north side of central London to Euston station. A junction which used to be important to me as the place where I plied my one-time trade as a materials technician (concrete) with Messrs Sandberg of reference 2, at a time when the Westway was a building site for John Laing, a time when main contractors were main contractors and were not submerged in a sea of sub-contractors.

While the A50 seems to have got rather lost. It was once the main road from London to Leicester, but now only seems to live on in a stretch of road leading to Warrington up north.

On the up side, I have learned about the A6, which used to branch off the A1 for Carlisle at Barnet, a little to the north of London. Not one of the original quintet, but a long and important road nonetheless. See reference 3 for a sample of Wikipedia's efforts in this department.

PS 1: here at Epsom we are on the A24, which now branches off the A3 at Clapham Common tube station, from where it makes it more or less all the way to Worthing. Important enough that you get signs at Elephant & Castle.

PS 2: while Cycle Superhighway No.7 (recently renamed), a route I use from time to time, either on a Bullingdon or on foot, follows the A3 from Elephant & Castle until Clapham Common, where it takes off down the A24.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-bent-crane.html.

Reference 2: https://www.sandberg.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A6_road_(England).