It covers 30 acres, is made out of 134,000 cubic metres of concrete and has carried 2 billion cars, and today it celebrates its fortieth birthday.
When the Gravelly Hill Interchange in Birmingham was opened in 1972, Roy Smith, a journalist from the Birmingham Evening Mail noted its resemblance -- when viewed from above -- to a plate of spaghetti, hence the name.
18 routes are served by the junction which connects the M6, the A38, the A38(M) and the A5127.
Construction began in 1968 and lasted four years, and it cost £10m (£143m as of 2012) to build. It was an immense feat of civil engineering and was built on top of three canals, two rivers and two railway lines. The designers also had to place the concrete columns in such a way that boats on the canals beneath the roadways could still navigate the waterways while being towed by a horse.
Spaghetti Junction was only intended to carry 40,000 cars a day but today over 210,000 cars will use it. As such, it costs over £7m a year to maintain the roadways but, despite this, the junction was designed to last for 120 years.
The junction also makes an appearance in the Guinness Book of World Records as "the most complex interchange on the British road system."
