The M25 at 40: Why I love London’s orbital, despite the traffic
Britain’s busiest road is boring and often frustrating, but we should be thankful it exists
I promise I’m not simply trying to stir up controversy in the Autocar email inbox here, but I have to confess to an affinity that I suspect few will share: I think the M25 is brilliant and it doesn’t deserve its poor reputation.
This is the busiest road in Britain. Of the top five most heavily trafficked sections of tarmac in the nation, four are bits of the M25.
The top, with an estimated 213,000 cars per day, according to government figures, is the stretch between junctions 14 and 15, which passes Heathrow airport.
Of course, that means delays. We’ve all been there (usually when we need to be somewhere else): you’re haring along happily at 70mph, when the gantry of doom flashes amber and the variable limit changes to 40.
Were it not for the roar of plane engines or HGV tyres, you’d be able to hear the collective groan of everyone else on the road. And that’s not to mention what happens when somebody careers into the central reservation or breaks down, and it slows to a crawl.
It can be among the greatest frustrations I’ve experienced behind the wheel. But consider the alternatives we’d have to endure if the ol’ Orbital hadn’t been built, and all that traffic spilled out onto local roads.
London’s North and South Circular ring roads – which connect to form a sort of mini-25 – are already bursting at the seams. To force 200,000 cars onto those, or onto smaller rat runs, would not exactly be fun.
We got a good picture of that a couple of years ago when the south-western section of the M25 was closed while demolition work took place.
Drivers were forced onto the A-roads around Cobham and Ottershaw. Our photographer Jack Harrison – sent there to survey the chaos – reported the ensuing traffic jam averaged 8mph, compared with what should have been at least five times that pace on the motorway, but many people simply didn’t bother driving that day.
What impact would it have on those people’s lives – on missed appointments and such – or on the economy were such a closure to be sustained?
I also think the nature of driving on the M25 gets an unfair reputation. Yes, it is horrendously boring, but I’d take the calm of running in a straight line and occasionally orbiting the Nissan Qashqai hogging the middle lane over the chaos of driving through actual London itself.
My preference, when leaving or returning from my home in north-west London, is actually to avoid the North Circular entirely. It is too cramped and I’ve had many a near miss with uncaring morons. Instead I go the long way around the M25, for the sake of my blood pressure.
It’s simply an easier, more sophisticated answer to traversing the nation’s capital than anything else on the road. And it’s also one that, from the very first suggestion of building a ring road around London to its completion in 1986, took almost 80 years to come to fruition.
The next time you’re stuck in a jam wondering when you’ll get home, or stifling that toilet break you really need, remember that it could very well be worse – and thank your lucky stars it isn’t.
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