And that's where I'm going to end my B Road safari.
I've walked all of Britain's lowest-numbered B Roads over the last five months, in sequence, from the B100 in the City to the B142 in Bow. I've also forced you to read about them, so if you've enjoyed them that's brilliant and if you haven't the good news is there won't be any more.
But this is the ideal place to stop, and for several reasons.
• B Roads aren't always very interesting. There is a limit to how many times I can write "look, there are flats", and nobody wants to hear ultra-fine-detail about shopfronts and lampposts on a road they've never been to.
• There are a heck of a lot of B Roads, indeed enough to fill every post on this blog for the rest of the decade, and you really wouldn't want that.
• So far all the B Roads have had pavements, and this is very much not the case later on.
• So far the B Roads have been quite short, none longer than three miles, but some of those coming up are considerably longer and I really can't be bothered.
• Indeed so far I've walked a total of 26 miles but the B184 is longer than that all by itself, which'd be entirely impractical.
• The last B Road I walked was the closest to home, so ending here would draw this feature to a natural close.
But the main reason I'm stopping now is because the first 26 B Roads were all in London but the next one is 250 miles away.
For reasons best known to the road planners, the B143 is in North Shields. It was originally part of the A192 but when that got diverted they needed a new B number and 143 was free so they gave it that. No matter that all the neighbouring B Roads were the Thirteen Hundred And Something because it's not about logic, more availability.
What's more the B143 is less than half a mile long, and it would be ridiculous to go all that way to walk such a short road for no sane reason.
But the main reason I'm not going to visit the B143 is because, by an enormous coincidence, I already have.
I holidayed in Newcastle in the summer of 2017 and travelled all over, including one afternoon when I took the Shields Ferry and walked from there to the Metro station. I was only in North Shields for 15 minutes and only walked four roads, but one was Railway Terrace and that turns out to have been part of the B143. I didn't realise it was of numerical significance at the time, I was just trying to find the quickest way uphill. Even better I only took three photos while I was in North Shields but two of them were of the B143. This is one (and you can click to see the other).
Both photos show the bend where Nile Road turns into Railway Terrace, which is just outside North Shields station. It's one way only - the bus stop markings should tell you which. The town's shopping centre is off to the right, which is not on the B143, whereas Charlie's Bar and Chez Hair Boutique are off to the left which is. The ferry terminal is down the hill, but sadly not via the route I walked.
There is no way I'm going back to Tyneside to walk a road I've already walked 10% of, particularly when it was the best 10%. But if I'll never walk the other 90% then I'll never walk all of Britain's B Roads, only all of those up to this point, so it's North Shields that sinks the project.
Which is a shame because the B144 is a good one, following the gorgeous Shepherdess Walk in Hoxton, then the B146 is Friday Hill in Chingford. But the B147 turns out to be a distributor road in Basildon, the B149 is the Chadwell bypass near Tilbury and when I said the B142 was a good place to stop I wasn't joking.
My apologies to all those of you who've been sitting there waiting for me to reach your provincial B Road because it isn't going to happen. At a rate of one road a week, even Terry who only wanted me to do the B515 in Islington would have had five years to wait. And if your local B Road is four digits long, as most B Roads are, I was obviously never going to get past the B999 (which is 16 miles into deep countryside north of Aberdeen).
Instead let me summarise what I've learned about B Roads over the last five months.
• They're very easy to overlook, at least here in London, because they're generally unsigned.
• They can be really short, especially in built-up areas (but in the countryside can be up to 61 miles long).
• They're often undriveable because someone has introduced a one-way system, a modal filter or even full-on pedestrianisation along the way - sometimes all three.
• Inner London B Roads are generally backroads of local significance, not critical connectors.
• Inner London has a heck of a lot more B Roads than Outer London. Camden has 19. Harrow has 2.
• Classifying a B Road is a very inexact art, and changes on maps sometimes lag way behind reality.
• It's up to local authorities to reclassify B Roads and often they don't even when it's blindingly obvious they should.
• The place to go to find out if something is a B Road or not is the National Street Gazetteer (although this won't confirm which B Road it is).
• The B116 ought to be the B166, and probably once was, but a likely administrative error means the Ordnance Survey thinks it's the B116 so it is the B116.
• Roadclassification was first introduced in 1922, which makes the original B Roads 100 years old this year.
• There may have been a geographical rationale to the numbering of B Roads back then but subsequent amendments usually mucked that up.
And let me illustrate that last point by showing you this map.
These are all the B roads in Tower Hamlets - thirteen of them current (in black) and seven of them obsolete (in red). You can sort-of see patterns in consecutively numbered roads if you look, suggesting some kind of initial sense, but the end result is a complex seemingly-random mess. At least they all start with 1, as they should do because Tower Hamlets lies in the road-numbering wedge between the A1 and the Thames.
Best just fire up your satnav and drive, I suspect. And let us never speak of B Roads again.
