This is a new feature in which I walk the entire length of Britain's B Roads, sequentially, starting with the lowest numbered. It'll be a tedious new feature, for which I apologise in advance, because B Roads are considerably less interesting than their A Road counterparts. Don't let the vague interest of the first in the sequence lull you into a false sense of engagement, because things go downhill pretty swiftly after this.
Please note I'm talking Great Britain rather than the British Isles, so won't be venturing to explore the single- and double-digit B Roads in Northern Ireland. Every B Road on the mainland has either three or four digits, starting with the hundred andsomethings, almost all of which are in London, Essex or Hertfordshire. The vast majority are actually in east or northeast London, slotted into a wedge between the A1 and the Thames, because Britain's roads were originally numbered in sectors starting closest to the City.
Many B Roads have been declassified, renumbered or rerouted over the years, so this series won't include a full collection of consecutive numbers. Also please note that although B Roads beyond London can be long and meandering with local importance, those in the capital rarely stretch more than a mile or two. Essentially you're in for a lot of short roads in Hackney and Tower Hamlets - maybe also Haringey, Newham and Waltham Forest - before I inevitably get bored and bring the feature to a silent close.
The B100 is the lowest numbered B Road in Great Britain and skims the edge of the City of London. It used to be shorter (when classified roads assiduously avoided the City), and also used to be longer (before Smithfield got lopped off), but I'll be walking the current modern-day version. It starts around the back of Liverpool Street station, nowhere significant, on the bend where Appold Street (unclassified) morphs into Sun Street (the B100). The City is on the south side, specifically the Broadgate development, a Thatcherite business neighbourhood built across the footprint of the former Broad Street station. The only interesting architectural feature here is Chromorama, a thin stack of 35 illuminated light boxes, unless you're a particular fan of generic anonymous office blocks.
On the north side it's Hackney, where rents are lower, and which used to be a lot less thrusting until very recently when the twin 'prismatic towers' of One Crown Place erupted. Its 246 highrise flats are for moneyed financial types who prefer a short commute, a members club on site and the cachet of an almost-City address. Three of its one-bed apartments are currently available with a million pound price tag, which seems almost obscene in one of London's poorest boroughs. I took against the marketing team as soon I saw they'd installed a fake City of London street sign at the entrance to the inner courtyard, but having since read the vacuous guff on their website I reckon it was probably entirely within character.
The first crossroads on the B100 is a borough triple-point, as previously blogged, after which we enter Islington. The subsequent cut-through is a one-way filter, unless you're on a bike, which means it's only possible to drive the full length of the B100 in a westerly direction. The road now passes through Finsbury Square, a particularly large quadrangle with a bowling green and a buried car park in the centre. The large classical building on this southern side of the square is City Gate House, recently vacated by Bloomberg and upgraded, so up for grabs if you're a homeless multinational. A plaque outside reveals that Austrian composer Anton Bruckner once stayed in a house on the site and started his second symphony here. Even if it's not especially hummable, this is not a claim the average B Road can muster.
Up next is Chiswell Street, in 1922 the sole extent of the entire B100. These days it's a relatively insignificant road and lined by rather too many lacklustre modern blocks. But peer up Finsbury Street and you can see into the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company, still here after 383 years having moved in when weaponry was generally handheld. A nice touch is that the intervening building is called Longbow House and has a concrete relief representation of an archer on the side. Today it's where Currys flog gadgets and phones, but in the 18th century it was the site of the Caslon Foundry which played a fundamental role in the development of typography. I like the postmodernclocktower on the street corner opposite, which somehow resembles a granite jewel balanced on two tuning forks.
Excitingly the next road on the right is Bunhill Row which is designated the B144 so I'll be back again later in my B Road sequence (assuming I can get past the B143, which may be one geographical outlier too far). The remainder of Chiswell Street is dominated by the Whitbread brewery, or former Whitbread brewery because it was operational from 1750 to 1976. This would once have been home to drayfuls of barrels and a vaults stocked with porter, but is today more suited to a piss-up, being part hotel and part conference/events venue. Look out for a pair of Victorian postboxes embedded in the front wall.
You'll know where this is, it's the Barbican, which the B100 is about to dive underneath. Beech Street is sometimes described as a tunnel but it isn't really, merely a road beneath an iconic concrete podium. Air quality used to be poor, as befits a 300m-long enclosed space, but in March 2020 it became the UK’s first 24/7 zero emission street accessible only to electric vehicles and the generally non-exhausted. It'd become much nicer to walk down, but in September the experimental traffic order expired subject to a High Court Challenge, which'll be why the signs at both ends have now been covered over.
The B100 comes to a close at Aldersgate Street, opposite Barbican tube station, but once continued all the way to Farringdon Street. Alas I can't therefore tell you about the full delights of this stretch, which include a Crossrail station entrance, a historic meat market and the future Museum of London. That's a shame, because the ex-B100 is more interesting than the next three B Roads combined, historically speaking, as you'll discover if you decide to read the continuation of this B Road project. Don't worry if you can't be bothered, it's already peaked.
