Busiest Bank Holiday for UK Roads in 11 Years — But West Kent's Own Routes Are Clear This Morning

Today is the Summer bank holiday, the last of the eight bank holidays England and Wales get each year, according to the official GOV.UK calendar. Anyone hoping for another long weekend soon will have a wait: the next one isn't until Christmas Day, almost four months away.

Nationally, it's shaping up to be a big one for traffic. The RAC is predicting around 20 million leisure trips over the four days from Friday 28 to today, which it says would make this the busiest late-August bank holiday on the UK's motorways and major roads since its records began in 2015. The breakdown by day: 4.1 million trips on "Frantic Friday", 3.8 million on Saturday, 3.1 million on Sunday and 3.4 million today, plus another 5.5 million people who told the RAC they were travelling at some point over the weekend but hadn't settled on a day. High fuel prices — the RAC puts a tank of petrol at £89 now against £74 a year ago, and diesel at £100 against £79 — have affected three in ten drivers' plans, though only 13% said they'd scrapped their trip entirely because of it.

None of the specific routes the RAC and transport data firm INRIX flagged as worst-hit actually run through West Kent — their predicted trouble spots were the M25 anticlockwise between junctions 17 and 12 (Surrey, not the Dartford-to-Sevenoaks stretch that matters locally), the M5 in the South West, and the M1 further north. We checked the roads that do matter here — the M20, M25 between junctions 1 and 8, M26, A21, A2 and A249 — against National Highways' own live incident data this morning, and found nothing to report: no active delays or incidents on any of them at the time of writing. That can change through the day, and readers can check the same live feed for themselves in the footer of this site.

The RAC's own commentary leaned on "persistent warm and dry weather" as one reason more people are getting out and about — but that's not quite today's picture in West Kent specifically. Today's forecast tops out at a mild 20-22°C across the four boroughs, with some rain likely: Maidstone and Tonbridge are forecast the warmest and wettest of the four, both around 21-22°C with roughly 4-5mm of rain expected, while Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells are a touch cooler at 20°C with lighter rain. Worth a coat as well as sunglasses if you're heading out today.

For anyone still deciding what to do with the day, there's a genuine spread of things actually running in West Kent today: Chartwell has three things starting today alone, including a new family activity trail inspired by Rob Biddulph's picture books and a Churchill exhibition in the Uniform Room; Knole's Gruffalo Art Adventure trail also opens today; Sissinghurst Castle Garden has an outdoor theatre performance this evening; and Scotney Castle's Summer of Play, Hever Castle's Energetique art exhibition, and Tonbridge's River Walk Music season are all still running. Full details and links for all of these are on our What's On page. Sources: GOV.UK, RAC, National Highways and Open-Meteo.