A41(M)

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A mostly unbuilt motorway, proposed in the 1960s by the Ministry of Transport, which came to be a vital part of the outer Ringway proposals despite it being mostly of local or regional importance. While plans reached a very advanced stage, to the extent that they were marked on Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 mapping (an honour usually reserved for schemes that are nothing short of dead certain), nothing of the route was ever built in its intended form except for one short bypass far from London. But since its cancellation, the need for the road turned out to be so great that a fast expressway on the same line was built in the 1990s.

Continues to Hemel Hempstead and Tring
R4 Western Section (Hunton Bridge Roundabout)
R4 North Orbital Road
Local connections to Watford
M1

The route

Entering London from the north-west, the A41(M) would have started out in rural Hertfordshire on the A41 between Aston Clinton and Tring. The first section, the Tring Bypass, was built and opened as an isolated section of A41(M) in the 1970s. Beyond here, it would have run south-eastward, providing bypasses for the towns of Berkhamsted, Hemel Hempstead and Kings Langley.

Map from 1977 showing the A41(M) proposal and completed Tring Bypass. Click to enlarge

At Hunton Bridge Roundabout, the A41(M) would have passed across the top of the junction on a flyover, with the roundabout providing connections to local roads (including the existing A41) and serving as the abrupt terminus of the M25, which formed the Western Section of Ringway 4. Eastward from here there is little evidence to work with, but the most likely outcome would be for the A41(M) to continue as a motorway upgrade of the existing A41 dual carriageway around the north side of Watford to terminate on the M1 somewhere in the vicinity of present-day junction 5.

At Leavesden, the Ringway 4 North Orbital Road would have terminated. Through journeys on Ringway 4 would have used a short section of A41(M) to travel between the Western Section and North Orbital Road.

Variations

Though it has been discussed and documented many times (even published in books), the A41(M) is nothing whatsoever to do with the erstwhile M41. The former is the Watford to Tring motorway described above; the latter was the "temporary" number assigned to the short section of Ringway 1's West Cross Route that was built and opened. The claim, which originated in an authoritative-sounding post on Usenet was that the M41 and A41(M) Tring Bypass were part of the same proposed road and would have been linked to form a London to Birmingham motorway. This is untrue, and the author of that Usenet post has since made clear that it was conjecture, not fact.

The similar numbers of the two roads (and their vaguely similar alignments) are probably coincidental: the A41(M)'s official name was the "Watford to Tring Motorway", while the M41 number is listed in goverment documentation as a "temporary number". The West Cross Route would not have extended further north than Kensal Green and the A41(M) would not have extended beyond Tring, stopping just before the border with Buckinghamshire.

History

A start was made on the A41(M) back in 1973, when the Tring Bypass was opened. Some fairly switched-on local councillor or MP must have pestered the Ministry long enough to get that section pushed through early, while the rest of the road remained in the planning stage. These two miles of two-lane motorway, far from any other high-standard road, looked quite odd in road atlases for many years until they were downgraded in 1986, when any chance of the rest of the road being built seemed to have vanished.

Some ten years later, that decision proved short-sighted when traffic on the A41 had become quite unbearable and work got under way to build the present A41 dual carriageway, a dual two-lane grade separated route that follows the line of the original motorway plan. The image to the left (click to enlarge) shows the new road, fast but clearly not motorway standard, at the interchange with the A416 at Berkhamsted.

However, the current road ends at the M25 and gets nowhere near funnelling traffic onto the M1. It is also built to a lower specification, with no hard shoulders and substandard junction designs.

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