B5041

The B5041 is a short, largely residential, urban B-road in Stoke-on-Trent. As a route south out of the town of Stoke-upon-Trent it has the street name London Road.

Route

Boothen

The B5041 starts on the A34 in Trent Vale. It heads northeast, passing a number of educational establishments and the boundary of the Michelin factory. Following a few bends, a linear park appears on the east side of the road. This is the former course of the Newcastle Canal, filled in long ago but still traceable here. Indeed, at one point a memorial is visible to someone who drowned there.

The road continues straight, past the bizarre former Stoke-upon-Trent library building before ending on the A52 Stoke one-way system.

History

The 1950s route of the B5041

The original route of the B5041, as given in the 1922 Road Lists, was along Wharf Street, a road of under quarter of a mile just outside Stoke town centre, between the then-A5007 and A52.

In the late-1920s, Michelin opened a factory south of the town and a new link road, Campbell Road, was built between the A5007 and the A449 (present-day A34) to serve the factory. It was also numbered B5041 despite the fact it was not directly opposite Wharf Street. Thus the road increased in length almost by a factor of ten.

This situation continued until the late-1960s. The new M6 passed well to the west of Stoke-on-Trent and so a new dual carriageway, numbered A5006, was built to link the A34 with junction 15. This road met the A34 at the same place as the B5041 Campbell Road, so it was later decided to reroute the A52-A34 section of the A5006 along the B5041 to make the route to the M6 more obvious.

The old A5006 received the vacated road number B5041 - but Wharf Street still retained its original number B5041, meaning that the road now had a longer multiplex in Stoke, with the A5007 and A52.

Wharf Street itself was destroyed in the mid-1970s. The route of Wharf Street was chosen to carry the central section of A500, opened in 1977. The B5041 thus from this time on only ran along the former-A5006.

The final change to the route of the B5041 took place with the building of the Stoke one-way system in the early 1980s. The B5041 was cut back a few hundred yards to Fleming Road and the remainder was numbered A52 as part of the one-way system.