spaghetti junction
Spaghetti Junction is officially called Gravelly Hill Interchange; its unofficial but widely used name was allegedly coined in the
1970s by Alan Eaglesfield (then a sub-editor of the Birmingham Evening
Mail), a nomenclature that has been adopted by other locals to describe their complex road interchange system although, it is claimed, the two words were forbidden by Maggie Thatcher — why the MP for Finchley should have bothered annoyed Brummies. After some argy-bargy, most map-makers sensibly began to respond to us locals rather than the fleeting demands of Prime Ministerial whim.
Factoids from wiki:
As aside: Go to any description of a city or large-ish UK town in wikipedia, and you'll find factoid upon factoid on roads and railways . . .
It [Spaghetti Junction] opened in 1972 after a four-year building programme. It is junction 6 of the M6 motorway, linking the A38 (Tyburn Road), A38M (Aston Expressway), the A5127 (Lichfield Road/Gravelly Hill), and several unclassified local roads.
The junction covers 30 acres (12 hectares), serves 18 routes and includes 4 km (2.5 miles) of slip roads, but only 1 km (0.6 miles) of the M6 itself. Underneath the motorway junction are the meeting points of local roads; the rivers Tame, Rea and the Hockley Brook; electricity lines; gas pipelines; the Cross-City and Walsall railway lines, and Salford Junction where the Grand Union Canal, Birmingham and Fazeley Canal and Tame Valley Canal meet (the image, above, is the view of the Junction from the Teme Valley Canal).
Across five different levels, it has 559 concrete columns, reaching up to 24.4 metres (80 ft) height. The engineers had to elevate thirteen and a half miles of motorway to accommodate the two railway lines, three canals, and two rivers and everything else that runs underneath it.