It does seem to be a common pattern here, that the old roads tend to name where they are going (which obviously only works in one direction!). For example, we have a 'London Road' which starts in the middle of Brighton, and takes you to London, which is 50 miles away.

We also have quite a number of roman roads, although not that many around where we live, which criss cross the country, and can travel for hundreds of miles, for example, the Fosse Way, here's google's name match, but if you zoom in on sections of this, you can see the fairly straight roman road with different 'B' road numbers (but still called Fosse Way):

https://www.google.com/maps/search/fosse+way/@52.3459536,-2....