How the M25 became a tourist attraction

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“By Byfleet station we emerged from the pine trees, and found the country calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight.”

I recalled that line – from H G Wells’s War of the Worlds – at West Byfleet station in Surrey as I emerged from the first practice of the morning from London on Saturday.

In this leafy nook of the residence counties, all was “calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight” – till the first Bulgarian truck got here thundering by means of. The lorry had been diverted from its deliberate trajectory by the unprecedented closure of a stretch of the M25 orbital motorway round London. And the A245 between Byfleet and West Byfleet has develop into a part of a diversionary route – as properly, I used to be to find, as a short-term tourist attraction.

Byfleet and West Byfleet became estranged in the early Eighties. What got here between them was an 80-yard-wide chopping carrying six lanes of site visitors – later “densified” to eight lanes. Over a regular weekend, each minute a mean of 100 automobiles, lorries and buses barrel by means of this deep divide.

Ten miles to the north: Europe’s busiest airport, Heathrow; 20 miles southeast, the UK’s essential vacation airport, Gatwick. And wherever you need to go in Britain, in the event you can’t entry it from a motorway or A-road junction on the M25, it’s most likely not value going.

Since Margaret Thatcher opened the full circuit in 1986, the M25 has develop into one in every of the most crucial items of infrastructure in Europe. For the first time, a daytime closure is happening. A stretch of the motorway southwest of London is shut for the weekend, till 6am on Monday.

The intention: to enhance Junction 10, the place the M25 meets the A3 trunk street linking London with Guildford and Portsmouth (to not point out Chessington World of Adventures). The solely approach to do that is to shut the whole five-mile stretch to Junction 11.

The message from National Highways: keep residence. Ahead of the closure, Jonathan Wade, the senior challenge supervisor working the weekend journey, informed The Independent’s every day journey podcast: “Please, if you can, avoid travelling completely, find something to do at home – decorate the bathroom or something, or play in the garden. If you must go: travel by train, walk, use a bicycle.”

I’m not in a place to evaluate how a lot lavatory ornament is occurring in the residence counties, however many individuals appear to have heeded the recommendation about staying off the roads.

I spent a number of hours on the bridge the place the A245 crosses the quickly abandoned M25. The most notable signal that not all was regular: the frequent passing of jap European vans, their drivers presumably unaware of the disruption till they arrived at the scene of the closure and had been directed off the motorway. Yet a Balkan lorry each minute or so doesn’t comprise an invasion on the scale of War of the Worlds, even when augmented by a powerful variety of National Express coaches.

Despite the fears of many native folks, the threatened site visitors standstill has not (to this point) materialised. On Saturday afternoon one in every of my native informants, Jackie M, concluded: “It looks like people have heeded the warnings. Just the usual hold up from Byfleet to Painshill caused by the traffic lights at Seven Hills Road.”

The absence of gridlock is one welcome shock; the different is the presence of sightseers. I used to be joined on the bridge by a regular circulation of locals who needed to “take a few pictures and take in the marvel that is an empty M25” – the phrases of Simon Vassallo, who has lived in the space for 35 years. Another native man, Terry Craig from West Byfleet, additionally savoured the sight. “It’s quite extraordinary to see the motorway, all of these lanes, just shut off,” he informed me.

There might be extra alternatives for such sightseeing this 12 months, since 4 additional closures of the similar stretch are deliberate. And whereas National Highways won’t thank me for saying so, I hope the tourism potential of the closure is correctly exploited.

I don’t counsel that guests ought to play amongst the bulldozers as the employees energetically pursue the Monday morning reopening deadline. But since a number of miles of motorway are solely unoccupied, I commend correctly organised walks and bike rides alongside the empty carriageways. Abu Dhabi opens its Formula One circuit recurrently to pedestrians, runners and cyclists, and the M25 might present the similar short-term playground. To quote H G Wells as soon as once more, “a beautiful serenity” deserves to be appreciated.

Simon Calder, also called The Man Who Pays His Way, has been writing about journey for The Independent since 1994. In his weekly opinion column, he explores a key journey challenge – and what it means for you.