Where is spaghetti junction uk

The junction covers 30 acres of ground, a site which also takes in two railway lines, three canals, and two rivers. In an unusual meeting of old and new forms of transport, the pillars supporting the flyovers across the Birmingham Canal had to be carefully placed to enable a horse-drawn canal boat to pass beneath, without fouling the tow rope.

Today it is still a popular route with narrowboat fans, although the boats are more likely to be diesel rather than horse-powered. Boarding a boat near Salford canal junction, in the shadow of Spaghetti's giant concrete columns, are Adrian Rowland, from Durham, and Kate Nye from Penrith in Cumbria. The junction's popularity with the rambling fraternity is easy to understand when you explore the contrasting sights and sounds beneath this thrumming artery of Britain's motorway network, it is very easy to see why.

Standing on the pebbled banks where the River Rea meets the River Tame, you can feel the gentle vibrations in the giant concrete stilts supporting the road above.

The geese milling about the tranquil looking river banks seem blissfully unfazed by the clatter of the traffic above, or the factories on the other side of the water. And some of the structures, although designed first and foremost for practicality, nevertheless have a beauty of their own. The sandy coloured Salford Turnover Bridge is a beautiful piece of civil engineering which has been marred by the mindlessness of graffiti offenders — and a strange fly poster written entirely in Russian.

At the end of one of the canal tunnels is an opening supported by 13 columns, which in another environment would resemble a Roman collonade.

The wonderland beneath Spaghetti Junction did not happen by accident, though. Rather it was the result of a most ingenious engineering solution to the challenges of constructing such a large development in the heart of one of Europe's biggest conurbations. But while a peripheral route around the edge of the conurbation would save money and reduce disruption, it would also mean longer roads and greater journey times. The answer was to build the road on stilts above existing canals and railway lines, which meant it was possible to create a short, direct route through the urban heartlands without the need for widescale demolition.

Today it is easy to forget just how the construction of this vital road junction transformed motoring in Britain. It meant for the first time it was possible to travel from London to Glasgow along a continuous mile stretch of motorway. In one day, Britain went from having a fragmented network of roads to a seamless motorway network connecting all its great cities.

The story began when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan cut the ribbon on the Preston Bypass in , the first phase of a plan to create a national network of three high speed "motorways". The Preston Bypass would become the M6, eventually extending to Birmingham in the south and Glasgow in the north. These certainly made journey times quicker, but they were still very regional in their nature, serving specific parts of the UK.

But when Spaghetti Junction opened in , it finally brought them all together, transforming a set of three separate routes into a single integrated network. It meant people could make seamless journeys across the country without ever leaving the motorway. Actually, there was a little more to it than that. But as the final piece in the jigsaw, and with its unique multi-level design, it was always going to be Spaghetti that attracted the headlines.

The junction was so strategic to the nation's infrastructure, that it was said to have been a nuclear target by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The final scheme was unveiled by Transport Secretary Barbara Castle in June, , and the work began shortly after.

The opening of the junction was delayed by a few months following the collapse of bridges using similar "box girder" construction in Australia and Wales. Nearly 4 times more traffic uses Spaghetti Junction each day now compared with when it was built - perhaps hardly surprising as the number of motor vehicles registered in the UK at the end of was Until the recent recession, and despite rising petrol prices, we continued to use our cars more each year in Britain.

There is little doubt that high levels of road traffic damage the environment. We no longer have poisonous lead in our petrol. These gases trap the heat from the earth, preventing it from escaping back to space. About one quarter of UK greenhouse gas emissions - with carbon dioxide as the main part - comes from transport and most of that from motor vehicles. The average speed for traffic in central London today is 15kph - pretty similar to the speed at which horses and carriages normally travelled years ago.

One estimate suggests that within 10 years more than 1. Country: Birmingham, United Kingdom. What did this project achieve?

Gravelly Hill Interchange, more commonly known as Spaghetti Junction, sits at junction 6 of the M6 motorway in Birmingham. The Ministry of Transport instructed Sir Owen Williams and Partners as the consulting engineers to investigate options for connecting the three routes in The engineers decided that a direct route would create better connections to the main population areas than a longer peripheral road avoiding densely built-up areas. To limit the amount and cost of demolition needed to create a direct route, they decided to use existing routes going over canals, rivers and roads.

The route consists of 43 miles of rural motorway, 23 miles of urban motorway, and 17 junctions. Construction of the junction started in , and took four years, completing in A multi-level junction at Gravelly Hill that enabled the M6 to intersect with the existing junction on the A38 Lichfield Road and with the Aston Ring Road, and a junction at Ray Hall are the two most important junctions on the route.

The name stuck, and has been used to describe similar-looking junctions around the world as well. The Spaghetti Junction was made with 13, tons of steel reinforcement and , cubic yards , m 3 of concrete. It is supported by concrete columns, with the highest being 80ft tall. A factory, a bank, houses, a block of flats and the Erdington Arms pub were some of the properties demolished to make way for the interchange.

Three water mains, a gas main and a way Post Office cable duct were also some of the utilities that were diverted during construction. When the road was officially opened by the then Secretary of State for the Environment, Peter Walker MP, on 24 May , the average flow of cars on the Spaghetti Junction was 40, a day. This rose to , in , and more than , in Michelin-starred chef Glynn Purnell created a dish in for Highways England, to celebrate 50 years since work started on the construction of the Spaghetti Junction.