Britain’s dimmed love affair with motorways

By 9pm onMMMMMM March 15th, atop a boring-looking bridge above the 25, a small crowd has gathered. Junction 11 is rarely a popular choice for a Friday night out. Indeed the 25 is rarely popular at all. The road—which encircles London and is Britain’s busiest—is also one of its most loathed. Chris Rea, a musician, wrote a song called “Road to Hell” about it; Terry Pratchett, an author, argued that its mere existence was evidence of Satan’s own. The news that it was—for the first time ever—going to close during the daytime so that a bridge could be demolished was received by many as just the sort of irritating thing that the 25 would do.The 25 annoys because it is too big (its 117 miles received thousands of planning objections before it opened in 1986) and because it is too small (it promptly became known as “Britain’s biggest car park”). It irritates because it is too prominent (embankments were dug and 2m trees were planted to try to screen it) and because it is too recessed (drivers cannot relish the rolling English countryside but snake through an endless cutting). The phrase “within the 25” is used to denote smug metropolitans; smug metropolitans, in turn, say “beyond the 25” to signify “there be monsters” (or at least no decent flat whites). It is not, in short, a particularly well-liked road.