Saturday, January 29, 2005
Great British Roads - A6: Luton - Carlisle
The first mile: Luton town centre - Wardown Park
No, really, I'm not going to be making this journey. A trip to Luton isn't my idea of a good day out, plus the first mile along the A6 isn't exactly beautiful. There's a risky subway underneath the initial roundabout, there's the ghastly concrete shed of Luton bus station and there's the backside of the Arndale Centre to contend with. But there is one important London landmark here - the early trickles of the River Lea. This flows directly underneath the first mile of the A6, from the boating lake in Wardown Park to the Luton Airport approach road, before continuing 30 miles south to London and flowing into the River Thames. Hmm, following London's rivers... there's another idea I might return to in the future.
As for the remaining single-digit A roads, they're all in Scotland. The A7 and A8 both start outside Waverley Station in Edinburgh (where the A1 also finishes/starts). The A8 takes the more interesting route, along Princes Street towards Haymarket, while the A7 crosses the middle of the Royal Mile, passes the cafe where JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter novel and heads into the southern suburbs. As for the A9 that now begins further west, connecting junction 5 of the M9 to the Falkirk bypass, which I'm afraid sounds eminently unexciting. So I'll not be writing about those (although I hope somebody will). But I might come back and write about the first mile along the A10, A11, A12 and A13 sometime, because they're really local....
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