NW2 service area

Staples Corner is a flyover, a roundabout, a retail park and the point where the A5 meets the North Circular, all in about four hundred metres. It is the hardest place in this territory to break down and one of the easiest to pick up debris.

Retail park entrances take heavy delivery traffic, and heavy traffic drops fixings. A screw picked up at Staples Corner rarely announces itself immediately — it shows up as a soft tyre the following morning.

Cricklewood Broadway is the A5 again, still straight, still a bus corridor, still with almost nowhere to stop. Willesden Green and Dollis Hill are dense residential streets on a slope, with controlled parking and very little slack. Brent Cross Town and Brent Cross West are new build, so the surfaces are good and the access is better than the rest of the district.

This is the south-western corner of what we work, and it is a run rather than a hop.