Most of us, at some point in our lives,
have abandoned a project half way through.
But most of us don't have that abandoned project
sitting on full, permanent display to the world.
This is the Road to Nowhere, in Yate, in south-west England.
Let's go for a walk.
This is 400m of never-completed 1970s highway
that goes from a roundabout to...
well, nowhere, it's cut off by a railway line.
I'm actually a little bit amazed that I only just found out about this,
because "half-completed road to nowhere",
with lane markings and kerbs and everything,
is very much the sort of thing that I'd expect younger me to have filmed five years ago.
And this place is not a secret. This is a big public common.
There's folks walking their dogs here.
The public can't drive on this road, though: it's gated off.
If you look at aerial photos, you can see where it was meant to go.
There's another roundabout a little way over there that it would have connected to,
completing a small ring road around the town.
And you can see exactly what the plan was... it just never happened.
And yes, there are a lot of complaints about the traffic in this town.
Also on those aerial photos:
some heavy equipment, and a fake bridge being built just down there.
See, this road does have a use.
The local council makes it available for filming,
the whole area is closed occasionally for television shows to shoot on.
And they can make it look like either a small country road
or a big highway depending on where they point their camera.
Broadchurch used careful angles and one composite shot
to make it look like a coast road.
And hospital drama Casualty have shot quite a few things here
over the 36 years they've been in production.
That includes their most expensive scenes ever,
which involved a huge fake bridge, crashing vehicles,
adding a CGI town around the road,
and setting off an enormous tanker explosion.
For all it cost, it's actually a little bit underwhelming?
Maybe that's a creative decision, maybe it looks more realistic that way.
And it's convincing enough.
This is an accidental film set.
At some point, some British studio would probably have built one of these anyway,
it just wouldn't look as good.
So the question is: why did this happen?
I don't actually know. I gave up on researching this project half way through.
Okay, no, I'm just kidding, according to one former local councillor,
it's because the price of steel suddenly went up,
the council didn't want to pay that much for the railway bridge over there,
so they put the whole thing on hold,
and no-one ever started the project up again afterwards.
There are still occasional vague political calls to complete it,
but I would be very surprised if there's any traffic
other than stunt drivers and dog walkers
on the Road to Nowhere any time soon.