B684

The B684 is a mainly urban road, heading from Nottingham city centre through the eastern and northern suburbs before ending just outside the city.

The road starts out just to the north of the city centre, at a set of traffic lights on the A60 Mansfield Road. The road (named Bluecoat Street), heads east, and over the tunnel portal of the old Central Railway, which ran to Victoria Station. That station has been replaced by a shopping centre, and the car park can be seen on the right, filling up the cutting that the railway once passed through. Just over the tunnel entrance, we reach another set of traffic lights, where we cross over Huntingdon Street (also numbered as the A60!).

The road becomes Woodborough Road, and crosses over another set of traffic lights, and we enter the area of St. Ann's, which was mostly redeveloped in the 1960s as part of the slum clearances. Many of the dreary pebble-dashed houses and flats are being regenerated again! The road here is fairly wide, but littered with speed ramps and various traffic calming measures, which slows us down further as we make the steepish climb away from the city. As we leave the 1960s estate behind and enter an area of old Victorian villas (now mostly converted into flats), we climb a bit more steeply, until we reach the top of the hill at the junction with Ransom Road. A few twists and turns later, past terraced housing, we reach the suburb of Mapperley.

At the junction of Woodthorpe Drive (a useful short cut to the A60), the road widens to two lanes in each direction, and maintains this layout through the busy shopping area. Beyond the shops, the right hand lane turns off to the right along Westdale Lane (towards Gedling and Carlton), and we are left with a wide, two-lane road. The houses get more and more expensive along the road as we start to head towards the countryside, but there a few obstacles to overcome - firstly a large signalised crossroads with the A6211, and a pair of mini-roundabouts which serve Lambley and Arnold.

The original end of the B684 was at a seemingly arbitrary point, now between the A6211 and the first mini-roundabout, presumably to serve the now-gone Gedling Colliery. The road still ended here on an unclassified road in the 1970s but was later extended to meet another classified road.

Mapperley Plains

The road (and the area) here is now known as Mapperley Plains. Houses still line the left-hand side of the road for a while, before open fields surround us. The Traveller's Rest pub is a worthy waypoint on the right, opposite the Rugby Club. Shortly after, the road bends sharply to the left, with a road running from the right towards Woodborough. We are heading west now, and after we pass the quarry on the left, we reach another set of traffic lights at a crossroads with the main Arnold to Calverton road. The traffic lights are quite tall here for the benefit of the eastbound traffic, as the road dips away sharply after the junction on an arrow-straight alignment. Just before we reach the A614, the road turns sharply to the right and runs alongside the A614 for a short while. This alignment was part of an aborted improvement scheme in the 1970s - our road used to cross over the A614 and run to the A60 a little way to the west. The modern alignment curves back to the main road a short distance north of the original junction, and ends at a set of traffic lights. Mansfield-bound traffic is directed left and to the large roundabout at Redhill.