The M25 is a bizarre but worthy tourist destination

"By Byfleet station we emerged from the pine trees, and found the country calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight."

- SIMON CALDER

I recalled that line – from H G Wells’s War of the Worlds – at West Byfleet station in Surrey as I emerged from the first train of the morning from London on Saturday.

In this leafy corner of the home counties, all was “calm and peaceful under the morning sunlight” – until the first Bulgarian truck came thundering through. The lorry had been diverted from its planned trajectory by the unprecedented closure of a stretch of the M25 orbital motorway around London. And the A245 between Byfleet and West Byfleet has become part of a diversionary route – as well, I was to discover, as a temporary tourist attraction.

Byfleet and West Byfleet became estranged in the early 1980s. What came between them was an 80-yard-wide cutting carrying six lanes of traffic – later “densified” to eight lanes. Over a normal weekend, every minute an average of 100 cars, lorries and buses barrel through this deep divide.