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The A303: Highway to the Sun

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This is nothing more than a vanity project, which would be a complete waste of time and money, and would create far more problems and confusion than it would solve.

Having spent most of my life living and working along various points on the A303, I thoroughly enjoyed this book as I could relate to the places described. In this fully revised and updated edition, Tom Fort gives voice to the stories this road has to tell, from the bluestones of Stonehenge, Roman roads and drovers paths to turnpike tollhouses, mad vicars, wicked Earls and solstice seekers, the history, geography and culture of this road tells a story of an English way of life.It may well have proven to be not cost effective to undertake a renaming exercise, especially considering that the majority of traffic on the new road would be the same A358 traffic that used the route before (I believe that, west of Ilminster, the A358 is busier than the A303 at present). Perhaps one number reflecting its old number except where there is a multiplex with an A road, whereby it would become that road's number. I remember picnicking on the stones at Stonehenge – in the days before they were roped off – during a stop-off on the way down to a holiday in Minehead in my parents' Morgan. To my delight, therefore, this is my story, the surprise and joy being that it contains so much I didn’t know. A nostalgic experience, informative, humorous, charming, but pervaded by the bittersweet scent of regret' - Daily Mail You may also be interested in.

It's taken me a long time to get around to reading this one, simply because I wasn't sure if it was going to live up to the other books. I'd have liked Tom Fort to find himself another bottle-green Saab 96 and fly down the road in it as he did some years ago. Not least when a detective chief inspector heralded the simultaneous high-profile arrests of Julian Assange and Shrien Dewani (the man suspected of conspiring to murder his wife on their honeymoon in South Africa) as a red-letter day for the squad. We idle in neutral at the jams which build up round the end of dual carriageways where two lanes squash themselves into one. What I'd really have liked is a map, telling me where to find the historical tales in the text, so I could shove the book in the glovebox and refer to it en route, safely pulled over of course.It is a great start, though, winning us over to the idea of a book that takes as its focus a tarmacked belt along certain sections of which may be found, in high season, thousands of motorists cursing themselves for having chosen this way to the west. What, therefore, rather disappointed me was the lack of emotion and human feeling in his account of its geography and history.

Diverted from the familiar A303 by a sudden closure on a dark evening, I joined another baffled motorist at a tiny junction with an unhelpful signpost indicating an unexpected place name such as Longbridge Deverill, or perhaps it was Marston Magna. The A20 became a trunk road (London-Folkestone-Dover) in 1936; the A2 didn't become one (London-Canterbury-Dover) until 1946. The documentary felt it was thrown together without any purpose and Fort felt that his presentation style would mark him out as an eccentric. In this fully revised and updated edition, Tom Fort gives voice to the stories this road has to tell, from the bluestones of Stonehenge, Roman roads and drovers paths to turnpike tollhouses, mad vicars, wicked Earls and solstice seekers, the history, geography and culture of this road tells a story of an English way of life.Although it can often seem that every documentary these days is packaged as 'a journey', for me, it was that sense of a single journey that was missing.

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