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Here on Barbelith and elsewhere I've mentioned the Stonehenge project I have been involved in but haven't been able to talk about it much until now because, as part of the team considering the application, it was politically unacceptable for me to express an opinion on it.
This is what Stonehenge looks like at the moment:
Tonight the application submitted by English Heritage to move the Visitor centre (the car park on the left and some buildings out of shot) away from the Stones and close the little road (the A344, also on the left) has been refused.
The Department of Culture was going to part fund some of this project in that they were going to help pay to put the A303 (on the right) in a bored tunnel. Tunnelling the A303 was not part of the application I was considering, but it was related in that it would have helped return the Stones to their natural setting.
Last week the Government announced it was reviewing this scheme and rumour and conjecture has it that the DoC pulled the funding for the tunnel because it needs the money for the Olympics. That left the Department of Transport having to pay for the entire tunnel, which they obviously refused to do, and so the Councillors of Salisbury District voted tonight to refuse it.
Whether or not you think the tunnel and the road scheme was too expensive, or unenvironmentally sound, the point is that because the Government put the roadscheme under review the Councillors felt unable to approve the removal of the little road and the relocation of the Visitor Centre. But I think that even if the A303 remained unchanged, this application would still would have gone part way to restoring Stonehenge. Look at that picture and imagine Stonehenge without the A344 cutting the Henge off, and imagine the car park gone.
Anyway, I feel miserable that all our work has been basically pointless, and I wanted to start a thread about it. It wasn't the most perfect scheme; there were many faults, a major one being that the route of a land train which would have taken people from the new Visitor Centre to the Stones travelled very closely to people's houses in order to avoid damage to another archaeological feature called the Cursus. Nobody really knows what the Cursus is, but it's a very important feature of the Stonehenge landscape, best viewed from above:
The Cursus is the long oval shape in the ground stretching from top left to bottom right in the picture.
But the application to move the Visitor centre and the road was better than the current situation; Stonehenge and its related archaeological features is a World Heritage Site. The current Visitor Centre is a disaster and fairly shameful for a WHS by anyone's standards.
Now the whole application is null and void and cannot be resubmitted unless it fundamentally changes. Maybe that will happen, and maybe one day English Heritage will find a better solution to the one refused, but it won't happen for many years. You see, it took the various bodies 15 years to get this far. Now it's back to square one.
It's nice to finally be able to discuss it though and I'd like to know what you think. I can answer any questions and I can confidently say I can take any criticism you may wish to make since part of my job for the last nine months has been to do exactly that! |
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