The North East's Industrial Highway Failure - A174 Parkway

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Hello, the A174 is a 33-mi long road that runs from Whitby to Thornaby-on-Tees, roughly along the border between County Durham and Yorkshire, like the pudding. For the most part, it looks like this. Nah.

[00:00:13]However, there is a 7-mi stretch of the A174 that's a little bit different. It's known as the Parkway, and it was part of an extensive plan to build a network of dual carriageways and expressways in and around Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, or Teesside. And today, we're going to talk about it. My name is John. Welcome to Auto Shenanigans. Why not consider subscribing? [music] The section of interest runs from the Greystones roundabout in Eston and the Parkway interchange in Thornaby. It opened in 1975 and was built with one specific purpose: to move industrial and heavy traffic from the various works to the A19, where they could then bugger off elsewhere. Until its construction, the A174 followed this route, mostly along what we now know as the B1380.

[00:01:02]And over time, as the industry in the area grew in size, it became apparent that it was no longer fit for purpose.

[00:01:08]In fact, it was realized that the entire Teesside road network was no longer fit for purpose. Because of this. Oh, yeah, it's been demolished, but it would have been Teesside Steelworks, one of the many huge industries operating in the area that had its roots planted within the Victorian era, but later, during that second small disagreement of 1939 to 1945, saw rapid growth due to an increase in demand. Such was the rapid growth, the Teesside area became target number one for our visiting German pilot friends. And that's because it had become a center of steel production, what we used to make the bombs, the planes, and the stuff. Post-disagreement and after a bit of a rebuild, the steelworks grew to have 91 blast furnaces spread over a 10-mi area, making it one of the largest sites in the world. And they weren't the only one. For example, ICI chemicals set up a huge site making all of the plastic loveliness and such company growth required a workforce, a fairly significant one. But this was a time of proactivity and the rebuilding of the country. So, plans were put together to expand the Teesside area with masses of housing developments to provide homes for workers and to rebuild those that had been destroyed some years earlier.

[00:02:16]And of course, with that would come a road network to connect it all together in a fairly sensible fashion. And not a moment too soon because the old A174 or new B1380 was already struggling to keep up with the increasing number of trucks and cars and with more to come, things needed to get sorted. The plan looked a bit like this and with most of the heavy industry located to the northeast, any traffic would need to pass through the towns and residential areas that were due to see further development. So, the parkway was designed effectively as a bypass. However, at the time, the housing hadn't been built so there wasn't really much to bypass. In any case, they were thinking of the future which leads me on to the first of many interesting things you'll find on the parkway. We're going to start at the Greystones roundabout before making our way along and situated here at the roundabout is a set of ghost slip roads or unused carriageways that were built with the future in mind. The idea here was that a flyover would fly over the roundabout connecting up to the A174 on the other side. Lovely stuff. However, that on the other side connecting section, when the parkway opened, hadn't been built. It got caught up in some council bollocks and wouldn't open until a couple of years later by which time they changed their mind deciding to not bother with the flyover. Interestingly, within the Greystones roundabout is a public footpath, but it's not a footpath, it's an abandoned or maybe I should say repurposed road, specifically a piece of the A174. Before they started building the new road network, the A174 just passed straight through along this route. The roundabout would later be built on the original road giving us the leftover piece. Although, this happened before the parkway was built which in turn was just bolted onto the roundabout. Moving along the parkway, and according to this old plan, they built a few underpasses, mostly to maintain public footpaths, but there is one that's a bit more interesting.

[00:04:01]Mainly because it's far larger than all of the others, although in the end it didn't need to be. It's been built to accommodate a railway, and indeed there used to be a branch line running through here heading to Normanby Brickworks, a fairly major site, but it closed in 1971 and the railways were removed a few years before the parkway was finished.

[00:04:19]But the road was designed with the railway in mind, and it was too late to change anything, so they built an underpass for a railway, but by the time it was finished, the railway no longer existed. Speaking of not existing, I'm in a field where you'll need to use your imagination for a moment and pretend that there's a bridge crossing over the parkway carrying a dual carriageway.

[00:04:37]That dual carriageway was part of the Teesside road network plan that didn't get built, but it would have been known as the Marton North South Link Road.

[00:04:45]According to the plan, a dual carriageway would have extended from the A171 to then cross over the parkway before making its way up to Middlesbrough. To help your imagination, if you take a look at an aerial image, you can see a strip of land that hasn't seen any development. This was reserved way back in the 1960s for the Marton Link Road, but it was never constructed, the reasons for which we'll get onto shortly. Before then, let's talk junctions. Excluding the roundabouts at either end, there are four junctions along the parkway. The first we'd reach if heading east is a limited access junction that's not very interesting.

[00:05:17]The second junction, known as the Marton Interchange, allows for access in all directions, although at the time of filming, that's not the case because the junction is currently undergoing a 6-month, so 12-month refurbishment. The problem mainly lies with the bridge crossing over the parkway. Like the rest of the road, it was built in the early 1970s, and it's now pretty much at the end of its design life, so it needs some concrete repairs, new joints, waterproofing. Whilst they're at it, kerbstones, footways, resurfacing, etc. So, it's certainly not a small job, and throughout the duration of the works, the junction has restricted movements for traffic, but it's all a good thing because it will ensure the prolonged life of the structure and in turn the road. Is the rest of the 1970s road falling apart? Yeah, probably. Something else that fell apart, if you don't mind a tangent real quick, was the Marton Hotel and Country Club today represented by this area of nothing next to the Marton Interchange. Go back a few years on Street View and we can see the building in all of its glory, if that's the term. It opened in the 1960s and I imagine many of the people who built the Parkway stayed there during its construction. The hotel survived until 2017, but following a mysterious fire in 2019, it was demolished. Coming soon, not luxury flats, but an Aldi supermarket. I think Aldi might have taken things a bit far this time. Anyway, back to junctions and junction number three is, well, you tell me. Look at it. We've got a slip road here, some over there, there's a loop.

[00:06:42]It's all a bit messy and from what I can tell, this is how they wanted it to be, although I'm not entirely sure why. That said, it is a lot more interesting than the previous two junctions. The answer to its peculiar layout might come from a set of road plans that are connected to, but not the same as those we've been looking at thus far. And to understand things further, we need to look at a road called Stainton Way and a bit of the B1365.

[00:07:05]These roads run through the residential areas connecting to the A174. However, we noticed that they have an awful lot of space on either side and this is because they were intended to be dual carriageways and in fact, they did build a short section of dual carriageway giving us an idea of what it might have all looked like. Had these dual carriageways been completed, it would have extended further east to connect up to the Marton North-South Link. Remember that from earlier? And what this suggests is that the dual carriageway through the residential areas leading to the A174 would have been fairly busy.

[00:07:34]Therefore, you need a junction that is a bit more free-flowing than say a couple of slip roads and I I that's why we ended up with an odd design because the theory was it was more suited to a higher amount of traffic, but we don't have those dual carriageways nor the north and south link road. So, what happened to all of that? Whilst it was all part of the plan, the idea was to build it in stages in line with the population growth, but that turned out to be a lot slower than they thought it would be because those huge industries that led to the road network and housing being constructed in the first place entered a decline throughout the 1970s and 80s with a quarter of the jobs disappearing. That led to hardly anyone moving to the area, and in turn a lot of the roads and plans were cancelled because it wasn't deemed suitable to be building when everything else was going tits up. See demolished steelworks from earlier. The Parkway had already been started before such issues and mostly escaped cancellation. So, back to it.

[00:08:27]Junction 4 of 4 is a limited access trumpet style interchange that until fairly recently retained its original layout. In the late 2010s, a new batch of housing was built right on top of the junction, and to facilitate this, a roundabout and road was built directly onto the interchange, ruining it forevermore. And with that being the last junction, we arrive at the end of the Parkway at the Parkway interchange.

[00:08:49]End of the Parkway, yes, but it's not quite the end of the story because whilst most of the Parkway escaped cancellation, there was a section that didn't make it to the construction stage, and it would have run from the Parkway interchange to the A66.

[00:09:03]Built to plan, the Parkway interchange would have been a three-level stacked interchange with a flyover running over the top to head west, where it would then smash its way through these trees or area of greenery and up to the A66.

[00:09:14]Lovely. But it didn't happen, and instead the Parkway or A174 comes to a fairly abrupt end, much like this video.

[00:09:21]Thank you very much for watching. Like and subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you guys next time. Take care. Bye-bye. [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> Woo!