M1 Junction 23A to Junction 24 (East Midlands Airport)

Under two miles of motorway beside East Midlands Airport, and the airport is the reason the traffic looks the way it does. This is the UK’s busiest dedicated air-freight airport, it runs twenty-four hours with no slot restrictions, and the lorries that serve it are on this stretch of the M1.

Better than one vehicle in three here is carrying goods

That makes it the 15th busiest of the 42 measured stretches of M1 mainline, and the 10th 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.

Lorries and vans together come to 45,855 vehicles a day, 34.9% of everything on the road. And the lorries are big ones: 8,361 a day are six-axle articulated vehicles, and five- and six-axle artics together make up over 70% of the HGV total. This is not light rigid delivery traffic.

The step change happens exactly at junction 23A

The stretch immediately south, from junction 23 to junction 23A, carries 106,784 vehicles a day. At junction 23A the flow jumps by 24,612 vehicles — a 23% increase in under a mile — and the lorry count rises by 28%. The traffic joining from the A42 and A453 is more lorry-heavy than the M1 traffic already on the road, which is why the lorry share goes up rather than being diluted.

What the airport actually does, and why it runs at night

East Midlands Airport handled around 4 million passengers in 2025. It also handled 413,664 tonnes of cargo in the 2025/6 financial year, up 12.5% on the year before — more than a third of all air cargo growth in the UK. Its operator describes it as the UK’s busiest pure cargo airport, a description the UK Government also uses; Heathrow moves more tonnage overall, but most of that travels in the holds of passenger aircraft.

DHL, UPS, FedEx and Royal Mail all use it as a UK hub, and the airport operates twenty-four hours with no slot restrictions. That is the mechanism behind lorry movements on this stretch through the night, when most of the motorway is quiet.

Immediately north is East Midlands Gateway, a 700-acre SEGRO logistics park with its own 50-acre rail freight interchange, connected by a purpose-built branch line and capable of handling up to sixteen 775-metre freight trains a day. Amazon, DHL, Kuehne + Nagel, XPO and Games Workshop are among its occupiers. A second phase of around 252 acres is planned close to junction 23A, with a minimum of 4,000 jobs and highway works including parts of junction 24.

Junction 23A is a partial junction, and it catches people out

There is no access to the A42 from the northbound exit, and no access to the A453 from the southbound exit. The airport is signed from junction 23A northbound and junction 24 southbound — which junction you want depends on which way you are travelling.

Junction 24 is a full roundabout interchange for the A6, A50 and A453, with four lanes each way on the motorway. Worth knowing: junction 24A immediately north has no northbound exit at all, and the sign tells you to use junction 24 instead. The A453 runs parallel to the motorway along this entire stretch, so there is a continuous alternative beside you.

A controlled motorway, and the delay is at junction 25, not here

Junctions 23a to 24 are a four-lane controlled motorway with the hard shoulder retained, opened February 2019. All-lane running on the M1 starts north of junction 24, not on this stretch. Before the conversion this length was already four lanes plus hard shoulder, so what the scheme added here was technology and variable limits rather than a running lane.

National Highways’ own post-opening evaluation is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing: before the scheme, speeds on this section were “around 60mph in most time periods, around a mile a minute, suggesting there were limited issues with congestion”. The delay it identified on this corridor is on the northbound approach to junction 25, further north. Collisions on the scheme length fell from a five-year average of fifteen a year to four in the first year afterwards.

Two things nearby that move a great deal of traffic at once

Donington Park circuit is four miles from junction 23A and five from junction 24, and the western end of the airport runway is only about 400 yards from the eastern end of the track. For Download Festival in June 2025, National Highways advised that around 75,000 people would be travelling and warned of significant increases on the M1, A42, A453, A50 and A38.

Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station closed on 30 September 2024 — the last coal-fired power station in the country, ending 142 years of coal generation in Great Britain. Its cooling towers are to be brought down by controlled detonation by October 2030 at the latest, and the demolition strategy has to be agreed with National Highways because of the motorway.

Kegworth, 8 January 1989

British Midland flight 092, a Boeing 737-400 from Heathrow to Belfast, came down on the western embankment of the M1 on the evening of 8 January 1989 after a fan blade fractured in the left engine and the working right engine was shut down in error. Of the 126 people on board, 47 died and 79 survived. The aircraft crossed the motorway and struck the embankment just short of the runway, between these two junctions.

No one travelling on the motorway was injured. The accident report made 31 recommendations and changed both the brace position advised to passengers and the in-flight testing required of new turbofan engines. There is a memorial at Kegworth Cemetery on Whatton Road, and a plaque on the bridge over the M1.

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.

The A42 for the M42, and dates to plan around

The A42 that joins at junction 23A is the continuation of the M42, the route south-west towards Birmingham. Our sister site M42 Traffic covers that motorway, so a journey from the M1 to the Birmingham side can be checked end to end.

The airport’s exact passenger figure for 2025 was 3,955,756 (CAA), small beside its cargo role.

The next date worth putting in the diary is Download Festival, 9–13 June 2027, at Donington Park beside the airport. National Highways’ advice for the 2025 festival is quoted above; if you are driving this stretch that week, check the news on this page before setting off.