A594 (Leicester)

This article is about the Leicester Inner Ring Road.
For what is left of the original route across the Lake District, see A594 (Papcastle - Maryport).

The A594 Leicester Central Ring Road forms a mix of grade separated and at-grade links around the central area of the city. Much of it is purpose built, originally part of the A46 when it ran through the city centre, but the southern parts are a mish-mash of upgraded streets formed into one way systems.

Running clockwise, if we start at the traffic lights where Almond Road meets the A426 Aylestone Road by Leicester College, the A594 heads north along the one-way northern end of Aylestone Road, past the Welford Road Stadium (home of Leicester Tigers) and the Royal Infirmary to cannon off its anticlockwise route and run along Oxford Street to reach the Newarke Gateway of the castle. This used to sit on an island in the middle of the A594 but has been rescued from this fate in recent years.

Clockwise and anti-clockwise routes of the A594 meet here. The anti-clockwise route runs east along Newarke Street to bear right at traffic lights to meet the cannon mentioned above. It then passes the other side of the rugby stadium to meet the other end of the A594 loop round the northern edge of the city centre.

The A594 from the GSJ

The A594 seems to improve in quality at the Newarke Gateway. Now grade-separated dual-carriageway it runs under a roundabout on the A47 before screeching to a halt at traffic lights where it meets the A50. Although we're still dual, plans for a grade-separated ring road didn't get much further than the last junction. There's another set of lights for the A6 soon afterwards but there is at least one further GSJ on the A594 where it meets the A607, even if the flyover is S2.

Now running round the eastern side of the city centre (and dual once more) a roundabout is met on the A47 after which the road detours round the station car park and meets the A6 at lights by the station itself. Now alongside the railway line, the road drops down to go under New Walk, a pedestrian boulevard, before reaching the Welford Road Stadium once more and bearing left onto the anti-clockwise A594 mentioned two paragraphs above.

Back to a one-way single-carriageway road, the A594 soon TOTSOs right on meeting the A5199 to head west along the two-way D2 Almond Road. This brings us back to the traffic lights on the A426 Aylestone Road where we started our loop nearly four miles back.