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Drivers have been warned of lengthy delays and to only travel if necessary as parts of the M25 shut for the whole weekend.
The motorway – which is Britain’s busiest – will be closed in both directions between junctions 9 and 10 in Surrey from 9pm on Friday until 6am on Monday while concrete beams for a new bridge are installed.
National Highways senior project manager Jonathan Wade told drivers to leave extra time, follow official diversion routes and to “only travel if absolutey necessary”.
Diversion routes will take cars on a 19-mile journey on A roads, crossing from Surrey into London’s Ulez area, though National Highways has assured drivers “no enforcement action will be taken”.
The closure comes weeks after the motorway’s first-ever planned daytime closure over the weekend of March 15 which saw two-mile queues form.
Many drivers heeded advice to avoid the area in March allowing, meaning long traffic james to be avoided but Mr Wade warned this closure – which is two miles longer than the last – will be “far from a repeat of the previous closure”.
How the M25 became a tourist attraction
Our travel correspondent Simon Calder reports:
“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 train of the morning from London on Saturday.
In this leafy corner of the home counties, all was “calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight” – until the first Bulgarian truck came thundering through.
The lorry had been diverted from its planned trajectory by the unprecedented closure of a stretch of the M25 orbital motorway around London.
And the A245 between Byfleet and West Byfleet has become part of a diversionary route – as well, I was to discover, as a temporary tourist attraction:
Athena Stavrou10 May 2024 10:16
Facts about the M25
The M25 normally carries between 4,000 and 6,000 vehicles in each direction every hour from 10am until 9pm at weekends between junctions nine and 11.
Here are some others facts about the motorway circling the capital city:
- The M25 cost almost £1bn in the 1980s
- Two…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Independent Travel…