M62 Junction 4: The Rocket, Queens Drive, Liverpool

M62 J4: The Rocket is where the M62 begins, on Queens Drive (A5058), Liverpool's ring road, north of the River Mersey. The motorway starts at Junction 4 because Junctions 1 to 3 were never built: the M62 was planned to carry on into the city towards Edge Hill and Lime Street, joining a Liverpool Inner Motorway that was never constructed.

Edge Lane Drive and Bowring Park Road (A5080) also meet here, with Broad Green, Knotty Ash and Swanside beside the junction. Broad Green Hospital is right by the junction, and Alder Hey Children's Hospital, with its Ronald McDonald House for families, is a short drive north on East Prescot Road.

Liverpool is famous for the Beatles: the Penny Lane mural is about a mile and a half south-west, the Casbah Coffee Club about two miles north, and Liverpool John Lennon Airport, a single-runway airport handling around 5.6 million passengers a year, is south of the motorway; from Junction 6, the A5300 Knowsley Expressway and the A561 Speke Road lead down to it.

Also from Junction 6, the M57 leads north towards Knowsley Park, the parkland of Knowsley Hall, home to the 550-acre Knowsley Safari Park.

Liverpool's built-up area is home to around 640,000 people, about a quarter of the Manchester built-up area's 2.5 million further along the M62. Most of the housing lies north of the River Mersey, with greener farmland to the south. Ferries to Belfast and the Isle of Man sail from Twelve Quays at Birkenhead, across the river, so some port and ferry traffic heads to and from this end of the motorway.

Bowring Park (J5) is about a mile east.