The Telford landmark that starred in a BMW advert and was rescued from ruin

Thousands of drivers whizzed by on one of the town’s busiest roads, getting a fairly fleeting glance of a mosaic tiled wall which had had a moment of glory, being used as the striking backdrop for a luxury car in series of colour adverts in Sunday newspaper magazines in 1988 - if you’re interested, a BMW 750L, five litres, V12.

“We thought it was so amazing that it had to make the backdrop for one of our adverts,” a BMW spokesman said.

The landmark was created as a feature of the A442 Queensway at Oakengates, an imaginative solution to the problem of facing a 300 metre length of concrete retaining wall.

But over the years it deteriorated. Bits started to drop off. The wall, not the car, that is. The cause was put down to moisture build-up behind the tiles and by 1998 displaced tiles were gathering on the roadside, and a 30-metre stretch of the mosaic was coned off while officialdom wondered what to do.

Was it worth repairing?

These things are expensive and it isn’t easy - the ceramic tiles don’t come cheap and you have to source them.

But Telford & Wrekin Council decided it needed a millennium facelift and the good news is that in 2000 it awarded a contract worth £150,000 at contemporary prices to fix the wall. The maker of the original tiles was successfully traced and agreed to make replacements to match the originals.

The work must have been a success because the mosaic under the Stafford Road bridge remains in place today, 45 years since its inception.

It was part of a new road completing the link between south and north Telford which was opened to traffic on Wednesday, November 4, 1981, which was four months early. It was known as Queensway from the outset, but was also the “North Eastern Primary Road (South),” the final link of the primary road network for Telford, completing the dual carriageway route down the east side of the town from Trench Lock in the north to Sutton Hill in the south. Many people still call it the eastern primary road.

The £7.4 million contract had been awarded by Telford Development Corporation in February 1980 to contractors R M Douglas Construction. The line of the new road cut through an area of previous mining activity, which meant disused shafts and seams had to be treated, and there were major cuttings through coal measures strata which needed special treatment. The large amount of soil and rock which was excavated was transported to three detached parts of the site where it was shaped to create “new landforms for future development.”

The creation of the dual carriageway meant major changes to local roads with, for example, a diversion for Stafford Road so that it passed over the new route.

And if you’re wondering what the design of the mosaic represents, it imitates a typical geological section through the area.