There's no longer a B123. It used to follow Poplar High Street but that was severed when they plunged a parallel dual carriageway through Docklands and called it the A1261. Shame, because Poplar High Street would have been properly interesting.
There's no longer a B124. It used to orbit two-thirds of the Isle of Dogs from Blackwall to Millwall Slipway, but someone had the better idea of extending the A1206 classification all the way round and the B number was lost. Shame, because Westferry Road and Manchester Road would have been extremely interesting.
But there's still a B125, and whilst not as interesting it is at least not very far away...
Walking Britain's B Roads: the B125 Abbott Road
[Tower Hamlets] [0.6 miles]
If the A12 is one side of a right-angled triangle and the A13 is the other, then the B125 is the hypotenuse. It's both a useful means of cutting the corner and the spine road of the Aberfeldy Estate, one of Tower Hamlets' least privileged communities. It's 50% longer in one direction than the other, so for maximum narrative value northwestward it is. And just for a change there is an actual roadsign with 'B125' written on it so let's kick off with that.
Abbott Road starts on the East India Dock Road close to the bridge over the River Lea's last contorted meander. It used to be more significant but the A13 is now a thundering dual carriageway and this has become a minor turnoff at a mega-junction ruled by an army of synchronised lights. Only traffic heading east is permitted to enter Abbott Road which helps keep ratrunning at a minimum, but queueing to escape from the estate remains acceptable. For those who like to know which bus route we're following it's the 309, as it was on the B118, B119, B120 and B121 because twiddly backroad buses are like that.
The modern block of flats on the left is phase 1 of 'Aberfeldy Village', a lofty redevelopment scheme that's inexorablyreplacing a large proportion of the original estate. Abbott Road only grazes the eastern end, but does get to host the show apartment and marketing suite attempting to flog balconied boxes to professionals who'd never've dreamed of living here before. A patch of wet paving with boulders decorates the main access road which is used mainly by a succession of two-wheeled delivery drivers. Meanwhile the council flats across the road are only four-storey, and reassuringly concierge-free, because ambitions and needs were once a lot lower.
If it's shops you want you can have Jay's Off Licence (Lottery Oyster Pay Point) or the intermittently-open A.K. Hair Styles (Best Choice In Town). The latter occupies one of the oldest buildings on the street, a Victorian corner shop from the days when a dense grid of terraces backed onto the northern edge of the East India Import Dock. The houses beyond are 1970s replacements, impressively ordinary and even blessed with back gardens. Whip out your GPS at this point and you'll see we're about to cross from the eastern to the western hemisphere (and it'll be the B160 before we traverse the meridian again).
On the corner of Blair Street is a oddly-typefaced mileage sign from bygone times, part of a job lot introduced locally when Bow still had a motorway. It's been pointing the wrong way for as long as I can remember but I'm pleased to say in the last couple of weeks someone's twisted it back. The triangular wedge of grass on the left is called Braithwaite Park, not that you'd know if you visited, and has been enlivened by a scattering of clamberable logs, mounds and boulders. Its shape is an echo of the original street pattern hereabouts, although back in the day they squeezed 40 houses into the same footprint.
Abbott Road tends to be bordered by an open space on one side or the other, and up next it's the turn of the right-hand flank. This recreational gap is rectangular with taller humps and a fenced-off corral for basketball practice. Yellow markers by the roadside warn of the existence of a gas pipeline passing underneath, as would have been much more obvious before the cluster ofgasholders behind was disassembled five years ago. Today all that's visible in the background is an emerging wall of flats, the first of 2800 that are scheduled to replace the defunct Poplar Gas Works, as existing Aberfeldy residents become increasingly outnumbered.
The next open space, this time back on the left, is Aberfeldy Millennium Green. This is one of 250 lottery-funded projects nationwide enabled by the Millennium Commission and the Countryside Agency, and spruced up what used to be Dolly's Park with mild landscaping and a stepped amphitheatre in one corner. I doubt that many community events have been held at this supposed focal point, certainly not recently, but the central terracotta tiles imprinted with a swirly sundial are a nice touch. The church on the far side of the green is St Nicholas and All Hallows, a postwar box whose steeple resembles an upturned ice cream cornet.
Just before the A12 comes a single long Victorian terrace which provides evidence of how everything once looked around here. Many houses have ornate plasterwork in a state of decay, bolted-on satellite dishes and sub-John-Lewis curtains. Mid-terrace is 'Family Shop', a dimly lit convenience store (and Haribo vault) which is no longer the News Agent it claims on the awning. Astonishingly the last house in the terrace is number 225, whereas on the opposite side of the road the house numbers only go up to 18, thanks to the entirely asymmetrical way large green spaces have intruded.
For most traffic this is where the B125 starts and finishes, slipping on or off the Blackwall Tunnel Approach Road's southbound carriageway. But thanks to serious engineering works 50 years ago a separate link ducks underneath the A12 and emerges on the far side via long canyoned ramps and a brief concrete tunnel. It's now northbound only but used to be two-way until 2011 when, heresy, a set of traffic lights was installed on the main road up top. At no point did planners provide a pavement, they expected you to use the subway, but if you're a pedestrian who's happy to follow the hatched lane through the gloom it ought to be safe enough.
A post I wrote in 2020 went into considerable detail about my Mild Urbex exploration of the Abbott Road Tunnel so I won't repeat it all here. But I can confirm there's a certain frisson to negotiating this infrastructural leftover on foot, especially while passing through the curved chamber at its lowest point. Also the final ramp's really long as it rises to meet the ultimate junction, which is how the B125 got to be 50% longer in this direction than the other.
If you found today's reportage a bit stretched, the good news is that the B126 will be another heritageworthy big hitter (and very much not Sir Oswald Mosley's favourite road).
