And by the way, how deliberately insulting was it when that service station was opened in 2003 and they called it Solstice Park? Like renaming the Barbican “Venice”: a mouthful of tarmac down the druid’s throat, take that, you hippies.
But the despondency of the campaigners is heightened not just because of the prospect of a widened road, from two lanes to four, and the disruption involved with building a two-mile tunnel, but also, as with all UK infrastructure projects, it’s actually not ambitious enough.
It’s the same with HS2. The monstrous waste of money gets the go-ahead and then we discover that the trains won’t even go direct to central London – Euston – but will stop first at Old Oak Common. And there’s no suggested plan to upgrade the London Underground, so you get whizzed into London (at a ticket cost they are not yet brave enough to reveal, by the way) before being edged onto an underground station platform, six people deep, waiting to squeeze onto a crowded Tube.
In the case of the Stonehenge tunnel, it’s not long enough. So when all the construction is done, all that will happen is holidaymakers won’t get to see Stonehenge and the traffic jam will simply have moved a couple of miles down the road to where the four lanes go back to being two.
And thus our love affair with the A303 continues. Built in 1933, it was the futuristic route from London to Exeter, the Famous Five journey from metropolitan smoke to West Country beach. Except that as post-war car ownership escalated, it quickly became evident that it wasn’t big enough and its history has been one of endlessly agonising weak improvements, bypasses and deviations.
Peak season, it’s a car park of caravans and God help the West Country holidaymaker amateur who heads west on “changeover day”. It’s always a tough choice: do you want to stand on a GWR train with your limited luggage, kids and dog for six hours from London to Penzance, or bundle everything into the car and crawl along the A303?
At least today you can gawp at Stonehenge as you inch past. How unromantic are the road planners who claim that one of the benefits of the Stonehenge tunnel is that it will remove driver “distraction”.
But perhaps you and I are the few left in Britain who encourage children on long journeys to look out of the window, to play “I Spy”, to pull faces at people in other cars. Everyone else caves into iPads and iPhones. Not us. We would rather shout at the kids for hitting each other and kicking our seats than will them to become screen-addicted morons.
But we are Luddites: future travel is geared up for screens. Travel on HS2, and with so many tunnels and cuttings between London and Birmingham, you’ll get an actual view of the countryside for about 10 minutes. Take off on a newly-built Boeing 787 plane, and the dimmable windows quickly stop you looking at the view and ensure your seven-hour flight to Dubai is non-stop Paw Patrol.
But if you actually press a South-West dweller on the stagnant pond of summer traffic that is the A303 they’ll admit that that’s the way they like it. The worse the PR for that road, the better, for that way it is like a moat – the first defence against visitors. We stuck two fingers up at them during Covid and now if they get stuck on that wretched road, so much the better. Next time, with any luck, they’ll take their sorry arses off to Tenerife and maybe drag those wretched second-homeowners, led by Gordon Ramsay, with them.
But meanwhile, on go the A303 sticking plasters, supported by the pokey service stations with their carb-filled over-processed edible substance excuses for food. And British infrastructure, because no politician is bold enough to be a proper long-term b—–d, ends up being a global embarrassment, a mouldy piece of aspic, unambitious, full of compromise and low on quality.
It took the druids less time to build Stonehenge than it did the authorities to agree to a pathetic little tunnel to go alongside it.
And all we have left is the miserable associated conversation. Did you take the train, M4/M5 or the A303? Whichever the route, you’re guaranteed a fabulously grim bucketful of anecdotes. It’s the new Great British holiday travel mantra: queues, queues, bad food and no views.
