This is the best view you will get of Stonehenge. If you try to go closer, you will have to ignore the car park and a busy road which runs close by. The monument these days conveys little sense of magic. There was a proposal to bury the road in a tunnel but now the government has buried the scheme, having concluded that the £500 million bill is too much, and poor value for money.
It is a pity, but I am inclined to agree. It is just a piece of expensive tinkering. The press of people and traffic around Stonehenge is a symptom of a bigger problem. This is best seen by looking at a map of Britain and drawing a line starting at Bournemouth and taking in Bristol, Birmingham, Greater London and the south coast conurbation This encloses an area that contains about 80% of Britain’s population. Within this zone, paradoxically, people, industry and other facilities are relatively spread out, to the point that huge numbers of are dependent on cars for their daily activities. In the early 1960s, around, say, Oxford, there was a network of quiet lanes that were ideal for cycling to explore the then beautiful countryside and virtually unspoilt villages.
Fifty years on, too many of those villages are surrounded by a sprawl of badly designed and badly laid-out housing estates and the quiet country lanes are so busy that it would be suicidal to attempt to cycle along them.
The plight of Stonehenge is a fate that has overcome a huge tract of England. The only consolation is that it is not "sustainable" as it is entirely dependent on having a supply of cheap petrol to hand.
The Guardian has published a couple more articles against HS2, one by specialist rail commentator Christian Wolmar, and another today by journalist Simon Jenkins. The main arguments in favour will doubtless be wheeled out by the commentators: the need for capacity and the disruption caused by upgrading existing routes. HST itself will severely disrupt services to Euston during the construction period. Capacity can be increased at a fraction of the cost by a variety of measures, provided that it is accepted that the additional traffic will run at existing speeds. It is not generally known that the Midland main line is, or was, four track all the way from London to Trent Junction, between Nottingham and Derby. This is because the additional tracks are separate, having been added for coal trains which trundled down to Brent sidings, on the edge of London, from a collection point at Toton in Nottinghamshire, where the Midland Railway build a huge marshalling yard. Beyond Derby, the main l...
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