Surprise and delight your fellow passengers with these fast motorway facts
We’re all so excited to be planning and enjoying a few jaunts further afield now. In celebration of that we’ve put together a Pocket Guide to Pit Stops of places to stop, eat and enjoy just off the motorway around Britain. You can find it in the April issue with instructions on how to cut it out and fold it into your very own pocket guide to pop in your glove box.
While you wait for your copy to arrive so you can plan your next sojourn, we’ve put together a few fascinating* facts about British motorways for you to share with your fellow passengers on the journey. Strap in! This could be a bumpy ride!
* The Simple Things can take no responsibility for what you or the next woman considers to be fascinating. We’ve led a sheltered life for the last year.
The first full-length motorway was the M1 but if we’re splitting hairs the first ‘stretch’ of motorway was in fact the Preston Bypass (now part of the M6), which was opened by Harol Macmillan in 1958. It was just eight and a quarter miles long.
The first motorway service station, meanwhile was Watford Gap, built on the M1 just a year after it opened.
Britain’s widest stretch of motorway is 17 lanes wide (both sides of the carriageway) and is found on the M61 at Linnyshaw Moss in Greater Manchester where the motorway meets the M60 and the A580.
The most haunted motorway in Britain is the M6, with sightings of Roman soldiers and a woman screaming at the side of the road. (Perhaps she’d seen the price of the service station coffee).
The longest motorway in Britain is the M6 (236 miles long), which runs from Catthorpe in Leicestershire up to the Scottish border, while the shortest is thought to be the A635M in Manchester at just under half a mile.
Rumours tell that there are dead bodies from gangland killings hidden in the concrete and cement that was used to make the M25.
On a more pleasant note, the M25 is also the only motorway we know of that has a cricket pitch on it. Well, ok, above it. There’s a cricket square on the Bell Common tunnel which the M25 passes under between Junctions 26 and 27.
The M1 has no junction 3. When it was built they planned to add in Junction 3 at a later date once the link road to the A1 was built. But the link road was cancelled so the junction was never built and a service station now sits where it would have been.
When the M25 first opened it had no speed restrictions. We assume they foresaw a time when speed restrictions on Britain’s busiest motorway would be pointless since it was at a standstill much of the time anyway.
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