A4 road
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Image:A4 Hotwells (750px).jpg Image:PicadillyCircus20040807 CopyrightKaihsuTai.jpg The A4 is a major road in England, also known as the Great West Road. It runs from London to Avonmouth, near Bristol. Historically the road is the main route from London to the west of England, and has formed the main western artery from London. Much of the route has been paralleled by the M4 motorway.
Starting at Holborn Circus in the City of London, it runs west into Westminster through Fleet Street, the Strand, Trafalgar Square, Haymarket, Pall Mall, Piccadilly Circus, past Green Park to Hyde Park Corner. At this point it leaves the congestion charging zone and continues through Knightsbridge, South Kensington, Hammersmith and Chiswick. The road runs past some of London's most famous buildings and institutions, including the Royal Courts of Justice, London School of Economics, St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, Bush House, Nelson's Column, the National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Ritz Hotel, Harrods, the Victoria and Albert and Natural History Museums and Heathrow Airport. The road is London's main western artery, forking into the old A4, M4 motorway and A30 in the suburbs.
Outside London the road runs through Slough, Maidenhead, Reading, Newbury, Hungerford, Marlborough, Calne, Chippenham, Corsham, Bath and Bristol. In Bristol the road forms an inner city ring road and runs through the Avon Gorge, terminating at the M5 motorway and Avonmouth docks.
The road was formerly classified as a trunk road, but since the 1960s the M4 motorway has relieved the road of long distance and freight journeys. Sections in Bath, Bristol and central London remain designated as trunk road, and traffic is mostly segregated on dual-carriageway on these sections.
The A4 is actually a combination of old roads and new. The Bath Road, the original road from London to the west, ran through Hammersmith, Turnham Green, Brentford to Hounslow. Here the Staines Road forked off left at the Bell Corner, and the Bath Road continued onwards to Colnbrook and Maidenhead. Between the wars the Great West Road was built as a bypass to relieve traffic congestion in Brentford and Hounslow. This ran across farmland from what is now the Chiswick Roundabout, rejoining the Bath Road at the Traveller's Friend pub near Cranford. A bypass for Colnbrook followed after the Second World War, build across farmland between Harmondsworth and the outskirts of Langley. These bypasses now constitute part of the A4, and the older roads have been renumbered.
Continued rising traffic levels forced the construction in the early sixties of the first part of the M4 - as far as Maidenhead Thicket roundabout - to bypass the A4 for its whole length, although the roads actually cross at the Chiswick flyover and just east of Slough.
The A4 received fame in the 1996 film Trainspotting when the main characters (Renton and Sickboy) moved into a flat on the Talgarth Road (the stretch of the A4 between West Kensington and Hammersmith). The film contains a specific shot of the junction of Talgarth Road with North End Road.