Qualla: M5 Motorway

M5 Motorway: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NotFromUtrecht, CC BY-SA 3.0. Friday afternoon in July, somewhere in Worcestershire, and the M5 begins to bunch. Caravans appear in the inside lane. Roof boxes ride the outside. By the time the traffic reaches the Avonmouth Bridge - that long, ungainly span where the motorway kinks and the lanes drop and the lorries slow to a crawl - the queue has its own weather system. This is the road Britain takes to the seaside, and like most British holidays, the journey is half the point and twice the suffering. The M5 runs from a junction near West Bromwich, north-west of Birmingham, all the way south-west to Exeter, hugging the western flank of England as it goes.

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Image: NotFromUtrecht | CC BY-SA 3.0

M5 Motorway: A motorway, shadowing an old road

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony Parkes, CC BY-SA 2.0. The M5 quite closely follows the route of the A38, the older trunk road it was designed to relieve. The two diverge politely around Bristol: the A38 plunges through the city centre and slips past Bristol Airport, while the M5 keeps its distance, skirting both with access from jun...

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Image: Anthony Parkes | CC BY-SA 2.0

M5 Motorway: The Avonmouth bottleneck

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit F123HEN, CC BY-SA 3.0. Between junctions 18 and 19, the motorway crosses the Avonmouth Bridge - a structure that has acquired the unenviable reputation of being the road's most reliable traffic jam. The carriageway narrows at each end of the bridge. The deck kinks in the middle. Heavy lorries lose mome...

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Image: F123HEN | CC BY-SA 3.0

M5 Motorway: Brent Knoll and the willow man

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Brooksbank, CC BY-SA 2.0. South of Weston-super-Mare, between junctions 21 and 22, the M5 passes a strange, solitary hill rising abruptly out of the Somerset Levels. This is Brent Knoll, an Iron Age hillfort that looks, from the motorway, like a green pudding upturned on a flat plate. Beyond it the road c...

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Image: Ben Brooksbank | CC BY-SA 2.0

M5 Motorway: Fog, fire, and four-vehicle pileups

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arpingstone, Public domain. The M5 has the unhappy distinction of being one of the most fog-prone motorways in the country. The section between junctions 16 and 18 was lit in around 1973 as part of a national programme to illuminate the eighty-six miles of UK motorway most vulnerable to fog. The danger is r...

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Image: Arpingstone | Public domain

M5 Motorway: The traffic that made the road

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arpingstone, Public domain. By 1964, the M5 was planned to end at East Brent, the village beside Brent Knoll. The Somerset county surveyor argued in his annual report that the motorway should go further - past Exeter, into Devon. He won the argument. The road that resulted has become inseparable from the We...

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Image: Arpingstone | Public domain