A46 road
road in England
The A46 is a major A road in England. It starts east of Bath, Somerset and ends in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, but it does not form a continuous route. Large portions of the old road have been lost, bypassed, or replaced by motorway development. Between Leicester and Lincoln the road follows the course of the Roman Fosse Way, but between Bath and Leicester, two cities also linked by the Fosse Way, it follows a more westerly course.
History
The original (1923) route of the A46 was from Bath to Laceby, passing through Cheltenham, Broadway, Stratford-on-Avon, Coventry, Leicester, Newark and Lincoln. Unusually for such a long road, no changes were made to its route until the 1970s. In recent years the central sections of the road have been rerouted and renumbered substantially, and there are now two sections where there are gaps of over 10 miles (16 km) where the road does not exist at all. The A46 has also been extended from Laceby to Grimsby and Cleethorpes – the road between Laceby and Grimsby was originally part of the A18. The section that connects Caistor and Nettleton has a couple of dangerous junctions.
The major realignments have been
Between Coventry and Leicester the original road was downgraded to the B4065 and the B4114 as a result of the opening of the M69 motorway in 1977.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4649340. Authority coordinates are 53.561, -0.035. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1923 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “A46 road” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.