B5418

Route

The B5418 at Wigston: looking south along Leicester Road

The B5418 is a short link road in the south of Leicester.

Starting from a junction with the A563 and the B5366 at the Pork Pie Roundabout, it runs east-south-east along Stonesby Avenue. After crossing over the Midland Main Line and leaving the City of Leicester to enter Wigston Magna, the road name changes to Aylestone Lane. A mini-roundabout is reached on Leicester Road in the town centre, where the B5418 turns in both directions. Both then TOTSO to the east, although the more southerly road is one way towards us. The end comes on the A5199, with the northern junction at a roundabout where it also meets the B582.

History

The western end of the B5418 in the 1950s

The B5418 came to the area around 1935 when a previously unclassified road was given Class II status. However, at the time it covered none of the above.

When originally classified the B5418 started at an apparently arbitrary point on the road to the east of Kirkby Muxloe, more-or-less at the point the road now bends to avoid the M1. It then headed southeast along Ratby Lane then (after crossing the A47) Braunstone Lane to end on the A46 (now A5460) Narborough Road.

Meanwhile, further east, the B5419 was created at more-or-less the same time to run between the B5366 in Aylestone and the A50 in Wigston Magna. With the exception of the east end (the main road, now the A5199, now uses a bypass) this follows the present B5418.

By the 1970s the B5418 had been extended southeast of its original eastern end allowing it to join up with - and then take over - the B5419. The B5418 was then cut back at its western end in stages (it still reached the A5460 in 1990, for example), so that the road now goes no further west than the B5366. The original western end of the road (declassified in the 1960s) became part of the B5380 when the A46 Leicester western bypass was built in the mid-1990s.