While driving, you spot a rectangular road sign with a brown background and white symbol and lettering, pointing off your route towards a site you had not planned to visit. What category of destination does a brown-background sign indicate?
- An industrial estate or business park
- A tourist attraction or place of visitor interest
- An emergency services facility such as a hospital or police station
- A public right of way footpath, closed to all vehicles
Why B? And why not the others?
Correct answer: B. A tourist attraction or place of visitor interest
Brown-background panels are reserved for signing the route to tourist attractions and places of visitor interest, such as historic houses, museums, or leisure sites, so a driver spotting this colour knows it points to somewhere of visitor interest rather than to ordinary traffic infrastructure. Industrial estates and business parks are not signed with brown panels; where they are specifically signed at all, it is with conventional black-on-white direction panels rather than the visitor-attraction colour. Emergency facilities such as hospitals use their own distinct signage, typically a white letter on a blue background, which is a completely different colour and symbol combination from the brown tourist panel described here. Public rights of way and footpaths are marked using dedicated waymarking, such as fingerposts or coloured arrows appropriate to the type of path, not by a brown road sign aimed at motor traffic, so that option also describes the wrong sign category entirely.
Source: The Highway Code: Traffic signs — direction signs on roads and motorways (GOV.UK), brown tourist attraction signs