A4390

The A4390 connects the Birmingham, Alcester, Evesham, Shipston, and Banbury Roads on the western and southern sides of Stratford-upon-Avon, acting as the town's relief road.

The first section, running from the Birmingham Road – the A3400 (former A34) – along Arden Street and Grove Road to Evesham Place, where it meets the B439 (former A439), is close to the town centre. In the first road-numbering scheme this route was unclassified; however, by the 1930s it had become the B4534. At some time in the early 1970s it was upgraded to Class I status and became the A4134. The number was to change again within 10 years, with the opening of the Stratford-upon-Avon Southern Relief Road.

Both the Birmingham Road to Evesham Place route and the new relief road were numbered A4390. The new number was probably chosen – in the modern "commemorative" style of much road numbering – as a reminder of the former A439 with which it shares a little less than 150 metres of common route at Evesham Place.

The relief road itself, named Seven Meadows Road and the second constituent part of today's A4390, was brand-new construction. Opened on 11 July 1990, it follows the routes of two former railway lines. From Evesham Place, and the site (where now stands a roundabout) of the former Evesham Road level crossing, it first runs south, for a little under 500 metres, along the trackbed of the former Great Western Railway line from Stratford to Honeybourne. Sanctus Road even crosses over the A4390 as it did the railway line.

Seven Meadows Bridge

At a second roundabout the road then swings east-south-eastward, following from this point the route of another railway – the former Stratford and Midland Junction – as far as Shipston Road (the A3400 again). En route it crosses the River Avon at Lucy's Mill by means of a bridge which stands on the foundations and piers of the original railway construction.

The third and latest section of the A4390 – known as Trinity Way or, more technically, "the eastern extension" – was opened in 2004 and connects the outer ends of the pre-war ribbon developments bordering the Shipston and Banbury Roads south-east of the ancient Clopton Bridge crossing of the Avon: an area known as Bridge Town. It traverses land which had, until at least the 1970s, remained largely open fields. However, in the usual post-bypass manner, residential "in-filling" is now rapidly taking place.

The route ends at a new roundabout junction with the A422 at the point where the latter road crosses the low ridge known as Alveston Hill.

[*] Date subject to confirmation