History of the A303
The A303 is the road that passes Stonehenge on the way to the beaches of Devon and Cornwall. Fortunately it’s history and controversies are described by Tom Fort in his classic tale of a holiday journey along the 92-mile length of the A303 in his lovingly restored Morris Traveller. The A303 Highway to the Sun, first shown as a TV documentary on BBC Four in 2011, is unusual for making a road a film star.
Fort digs up the 1960s master plan for the A303’s dreams of superhighway status, meets a Neolithic traveller who knew the road like the back of his hand, gets to know a section of the Roman 303, uncovers a medieval murder mystery and discovers what lies at the end of the Highway to the Sun.
Motorists have cursed and loved the A303 for years, but it is Fort’s explanation of the causes of seasonal congestion by Stonehenge that will ring true for many despairing road campaigners:
Whilst sitting in the constricted section on the A303 a few hundred yards beyond Countess roundabout, Fort muses that motorists might contemplate how it came to this point that they are imprisoned by traffic queues everywhere. “Somewhere along the road the ideal of automotive freedom died.” Too much mobility, concluded Tom Fort, resulted in “general immobility” (pp 126 onwards).
- Four short clips are still on iPlayer and worth watching.
- There is a YouTube recording here.
- Guardian Review (2013): Lovingly remembered from childhood holidays, the strip of tarmac from Basingstoke to Devon is both subject and hero of this hilarious memoir
Save Stonehenge! archived website 1998 – 2007
The earlier schemes and their associated public inquiries are recorded on the old Save Stonehenge! website up in a series of newspaper headlines, notes and links up until the short tunnel scheme was defeated in December 2007. They neatly capture the ups and downs of the Stonehenge campaign, supported at first by a few dozen environmental campaigners in the days before today’s veritable army of objectors and keyboard warriors.
Some links to statutory bodies no longer work, but what remains is a valuable historical record that includes media articles .
The website was archived by its founder, the UK Rivers Trust, in 2013 and can be found here.
A timeline of road widening proposals since the WHS’s inscription by UNESCO in 1985 to present time is available here.
Gallery of Save Stonehenge WHS campaign
These days we publish our images of events and activities on Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Here is a page of randomly selected archive photos in our less intensive social media days of our Save Stonehenge WHS campaign which began in 2014.
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