On a route such as you state it would not be that uncommon for radar headings nearly all the way. It would not be very efficient use of airspace to have lots of a/c following procedural routes.
From memory the general thing seems to be an initial clce from MAN Area Radar or LBA Appr. Radar direct to LBA followed shortly by radar hdgs to the ILS.
As far as runway turn offs are concerned it is not quite as cut and dried as I think you may be thinking from your comment.
On runways we try to turn off at the helpful point for ATC but never until we have first considered other factors such as safety and hammering the brakes. They are very expensive and braking hard is not good unless there are pressing reasons for it. On a large a/c you must keep the brakes cool (for various reasons) esp. if you are on a short turnaround. Furthermore you have to consider that at certain times reverse idle would be the max on the noise basis but this again comes after to safety.