Building the M25 Gade Valley Viaduct, Kings Langley c1984

This c1984 view shows the concrete piers of the M25’s Gade Valley Viaduct rising across the landscape at Kings Langley, with a Fairclough site board in the foreground and the first steel sections laid low across the construction area. The huge unfinished supports, each flaring out at the top to carry the future deck, dominate the scene and give a clear sense of the scale of the engineering involved in carrying the motorway across the valley. With rough ground, scattered materials and temporary works still spread across the site, the photograph captures the M25 not as a finished road but as a vast civil engineering project still taking shape in the Hertfordshire countryside. It is a strong record of a short-lived construction phase, when the motorway’s most recognisable structures existed only as isolated piers waiting to be joined together.