M1 Junction 21 to Junction 21A (Leicester / M69)

Three miles of motorway on the western edge of Leicester, carrying over 157,000 vehicles a day past a service area that has been arguing with the motorway around it for sixty years. Junction 21 is where the M69 comes in from Coventry; junction 21A is a half-junction that did not exist until 1995.

Over 157,000 vehicles a day, and back above where it was before the pandemic

That makes it the 4th busiest of the 42 measured stretches of M1 mainline, and the 19th for the share of its traffic that is lorries. The average across the measured M1 is 119,883 vehicles a day — see how busy the M1 is junction by junction.

The Department for Transport’s series for this stretch shows 157,383 vehicles a day in 2019 and 157,403 in 2025 — twenty vehicles a day apart. Traffic here has recovered to exactly where it was.

You cannot come off southbound at junction 21A

This is the thing to know before you drive it. Junction 21A is a part junction: northbound exit and southbound entrance only. There is no southbound exit to the A46 and no northbound entry from it. If you are heading south on the M1 for the A46 Leicester Western Bypass, junction 21A is not available to you.

Junction 21 itself is a full roundabout interchange serving the M69 to Coventry and the M6, and the A5460 into Leicester — the road that was the A46 through the city before the western bypass was built.

Not a smart motorway, despite the sections either side of it

National Highways’ operational smart motorways map lists all-lane running on the M1 at junctions 13–16, 16–19, 32–35a and 39–42, and controlled motorway at 23a–24, 25–28 and 31–32. There is nothing listed anywhere between junction 19 and junction 23a. This stretch has a conventional hard shoulder and the national speed limit.

Leicester Forest East is the reason this stretch is unusual

The services sit in the middle of it, straddling the carriageways, and they are one of only five motorway service areas in Britain ever built as a bridge restaurant — the last of the five, and the only one on the M1. They opened on 15 February 1966, cost £600,000, and were built on an Italian autostrada model with 72 fuel pumps and seating for 800.

The bridge itself housed a silver-service restaurant designed by Terence Conran called The Captain’s Table, cruise-liner themed, with a menu that changed weekly by country. Which? rated it the only decent restaurant on the motorway network at the time. The open terrace alongside closed to the public in the early 1970s on safety grounds, though the glazed staircase survives.

The services have also been a problem for every widening scheme that has looked at this stretch. Plans around 2010 showed them needing to be rebuilt or closed entirely before the motorway could be widened here; those plans were postponed indefinitely.

Fosse Park, the M69 and a new town are all loading the same junction

Fosse Park shopping park is about half a mile from junction 21 and now runs to over 400,000 square feet across three phases. Next plc has its head office at Enderby, at the same junction. And New Lubbesthorpe, a 4,250-home new settlement bordered by the M1, is being built out through the 2030s — 1,381 homes were occupied as at 31 July 2026, with its own new bridge over the motorway.

Leicestershire County Council’s own transport papers record that the A46 Expressway proposal “evolved from capacity issues at M1 J21”, and the county’s strategic transport priorities name junction 21 among the improvements needing investment by 2036.

Junction 21A is younger than the motorway by thirty years

The M1 through here opened on 22 January 1965. Junction 21A did not exist then: it was created when the A46 Leicester Western Bypass was completed in November 1995, and before that the A46 ran straight through Leicester on what is now the A5460 and A607.

Traffic figures on this page are Department for Transport road traffic statistics, annual average daily flow for 2025, both directions combined. Annual average daily flow counts how many vehicles use a stretch across the year. It does not measure how fast they travel, so the busiest stretch is not automatically the slowest.