B4550

Route

Blackpole Road, looking south

The B4550 provides an alternative route northbound out of Worcester city centre towards the A38.

Starting from a mini-roundabout junction with the B4205 at Lowesmoor Terrace / Lowesmoor Place, it heads northeastwards along Rainbow Hill and Astwood Road, largely paralleling the Worcester to Birmingham railway line.

At a roundabout junction with Brickfields Road by the New Chequers public house the route jinks right and then left, underneath the railway, before continuing its northeasterly course along Blackpole Road. After passing the Elgar Retail Park on the left and a light-controlled junction with the B4639 on the right, the B4450 terminates alongside the Blackpole Trading Estate West at an end-to-end meeting with the A4536 and sliproads to and from the A449.

An amended OpenStreetMap trace for this route awaits uploading to the SABRE Wiki.

History

The B4550 was originally unclassified but gained its number after World War II. Its southern end is unchanged but at that time the A4536 did not exist, so our road continued to end on the A38 at Fernhill Heath.

The A4536 came into being in the 1970s. There is evidence that originally it took over the whole of the B4550 but by the middle of the decade that road's southern end was on the A38 in Perdiswell on what is now the B4482. The A-road was downgraded further in the 2000s, with only the section north of the A449 retaining Class I status; the road from here into Worcester is now the B4550 once more.