A5006

The A5006 is one of those strangely important urban 4-digit A-roads that few people actually refer to by number. Its route has changed a number of times throughout the years, as mentioned below, and so the road's current length is nearly 2 miles shorter than in its heyday.

Route

Sideway - Hanley

The A5006 currently starts at the Sideway junction of the A500. It is not clear where the exact start is, given that all slip roads seem to be either the A500 or the A50. Even more confusingly, traffic heading away from M6 junction 15 along the A500 is signposted to remain on the A500 if it wants to follow the A5006 towards Hanley! This junction seems to be for local traffic only.

Leaving the A500 behind (temporarily), the A5006 crosses the River Trent and turns right at a roundabout onto Campbell Road, near the Michelin factory. This section of the road is purely residential, except for a very short section at the north end of Campbell Road where the A5006 passes the derelict site of the old Victoria Ground (home of Stoke City FC). A few hundred yards further on, the A5006 meets the A52 and gets lost in the Stoke-upon-Trent one-way system.

The next place the A5006 appears is at the Stoke Road junction of the A500 at grid reference SJ876457; however, it is not clear how it gets there! The obvious routes are Shelton Old Road (which is a spur of the A52) or Liverpool Road (which is unclassified and doesn't allow northbound traffic to reach the junction anyway). From here, the road passes under three adjacent low railway bridges (only the far one of which still carries track) at the north end of Stoke-on-Trent station to enter the city's university quarter. After bending to the left, there is a short tree-lined section as the road passes between Shelton Cemetery and Hanley Park. After passing Stoke-on-Trent College and crossing the Caldon Canal, a roundabout is met, where two B-roads join the A5006.

Shelton

Having now left the students behind, the A5006 now climbs up Snow Hill and passes the landmark St Mark's Church. It bends into the not-particularly-wide Broad Street and moves seamlessly into Hanley. About half way along Broad Street the A5008 Potteries Way Hanley Ring Road is met at what used to be a roundabout; this was replaced with a set of traffic lights in 2010 when the A5008 was extended clockwise to meet the A5010. However, the Ring Road has not yet been completed as a full circle, so the A5006 continues beyond this point to complete the loop.

At the top of Broad Street, by the Potteries Museum, the A5006 turns left at a set of traffic lights and becomes one way (northbound only). It passes several more sets of traffic lights in quick succession, one of which is at the end of the A5010; the road becomes two-way again after this but only for another block as far as the junction with Old Hall Street, after which the road enters a one-way loop. Northbound traffic skirts a piece of waste ground before coming to an end at a roundabout with the A50 at the other end of the Potteries Way; from here southbound traffic briefly runs alongside the A50 before bearing right into Hope Street then right again at traffic lights onto New Hall Street to rejoin the other direction.

History

The original line of the A5006 at the time of classification

The original route of the A5006 started on the A34 in Trent Vale at grid reference SJ864432. It then ran along the entire length of what is now the B5041. Interestingly, Campbell Road was numbered B5041 at the time! The A5006 met the A52 in the centre of Stoke-upon-Trent. Following a short multiplex, it left Stoke along Liverpool Road, following the current route of the A5006 until Broad Street in Hanley. It then ran up Piccadilly to end on the A50 Stafford Street.

With the coming of the M6, it was decided to have two junctions to the north and south of Stoke and Newcastle and to build new link roads to connect the motorway with the existing road network. This idea blossomed into building the A500, connecting both junctions with the city. However, at first, the section of dual carriageway between the M6/A519 and Hanford Interchange (where it met the A34 and the B5041 Campbell Road) was originally numbered A5006. The 1.1 mile dual carriageway opened on 19 December 1962, the same day as the M6 extension from J14 to J15 opening. Indeed, even after the completion of the A500 through Stoke, this section remained officially the A5006 for some time. It was not until the flyover was built at Hanford Interchange in the 1980s that the whole road indeed became the A500.

Building the M6 link road meant that the A5006 had to multiplex with the A34 for some distance, despite the fact that the new link road led straight onto the B5041 Campbell Road at Hanford Interchange. It was therefore decided to swap the numbers A5006 and B5041 over (for the section between Trent Vale and Stoke-upon-Trent), meaning that there was now one continuous road number between the M6 and Stoke Minster. This section was quickly bypassed by a new section of A500 - but Campbell Road still went all the way to Hanford Interchange until a remodelling in the 1970s cut off its access and meant that the A5006 was forced to multiplex with the A500 between Hanford Interchange and its current terminus at Sideway. The "useless" multiplex lasted until the motorway link road was renumbered A500.

The northern end of the A5006 has been far more stable. The only change here was in the centre of Hanley. After passing along Broad Street, the road continued up Piccadilly to terminate on the A50 at Crown Bank. Following the completion of the Hanley bypass and the re-routing of the A50, the A5006 was re-routed along its current route to form the western side of the ring road. Originally, however, Marsh Street was two-way, before the short one-way system of York Street (northbound) and Hope Street (southbound) gave extra lanes to the traffic. Naturally, this was a major bottleneck and so it was decided in the early 1990s to make Marsh Street one way temporarily pending the building of the western side of the ring road, which is still awaited. This explains why Hope Street is still marked as A5006 on some maps, although there seems no reason for it to be classified. In 2013 the section of Marsh Street north of the A5010 became one lane once again with the introduction of a contraflow bus lane, then two-way when the bus lane was abolished in late 2016, having not been used by scheduled buses for several months.