A crash on the M25 clockwise near Leatherhead left one vehicle overturned, blocked a lane before Junction 9 and triggered a 17-mile queue on Tuesday morning. Traffic was held for around 20 minutes just after 7.30am, turning the commute into a long delay for drivers already on the move.
The disruption mattered because it hit one of the busiest stretches of the motorway at the start of the day. National Highways said delays on the M25 clockwise between J8 Redhill and J9 Leatherhead reached two hours, while congestion spread across the network and built mainly around J8 Reigate.
By 7.59am, Inrix was reporting severe delays because of the earlier overturned vehicle before J9 A243 Leatherhead, with queues stretching back to Clacket Lane Services and halfway back to J5 on the M26. At 8.30am, the same service said recovery work was still under way and two lanes were closed, showing the incident was far from cleared even after the initial hold had ended.
That gap between the early expectation and the live conditions was the sharpest sign of how stubborn the jam had become. National Highways said the event was expected to clear between 9am and 9.15am, but its latest update still showed 90 minutes of delays, leaving drivers with little immediate relief. For commuters heading clockwise through Surrey, the queue was not a short interruption but a fast-moving problem that spread well beyond the crash site.
The crash affected the M25 clockwise in Surrey near Leatherhead, where two lanes of four remained shut while recovery work continued. The scene left the motorway pinned back from J8 to J9 and rippled into surrounding traffic, the kind of closure that can quickly snarl a wider section of the ring road. The number of vehicles involved and whether anyone was injured had not been reported in the available updates, so the immediate picture remained focused on the scale of the disruption rather than the cause behind it.
For drivers on the M25, the key question was no longer whether the crash had caused delays — it plainly had — but how long the queue would keep spreading before the recovery crews cleared the last lane and the motorway began moving again.
