The most exhilarating view in Britain is to be abolished. A high court judge this week brought a 30-year battle over Stonehenge to a conclusion by allowing the building of a tunnel to bypass it. Despite opposition from campaigners, archaeologists, planning inspectors and Unesco, the spectacle of one of the most famous prehistoric structures in the world will in future be confined to fee-paying visitors and a few enterprising ramblers.
So far the battle has been between English Heritage (EH), which manages Stonehenge for the crown, and archaeologists eager to preserve Neolithic remains on the surrounding downs. It is EH’s most popular destination, with almost a million visitors a year paying £23 to see the stones and £61 for a “stone circle experience”, which allows them to wander among them. EH’s plan is to enhance this experience by removing the sight of traffic on the road below the monument. The new tunnel, a major intrusion into the Wiltshire countryside, will cost a staggering £1.7bn.
But one party has been curiously absent from the arguments: those who will no longer enjoy the sight for free. For them, Stonehenge has long meant the thrill of the sudden glimpse. It is the exquisite view of the stones rising amid the downland in the mist or settling at sunset. It is the delight of recognition, of bearing brief witness to five millennia of lapsed time in the occupation of the British Isles. This party comprises more than 10 million people a year. No one mentions them because they are committing the unspeakable sin of driving a car on the adjacent A303.
I must have seen this Stonehenge a hundred times or more. Of England’s landscape views, I rank it on a par with Buttermere, Beachy Head and Durham Cathedral. It is nothing like the view of Stonehenge up close, which, in all honesty, is not especially exciting. From the distance of the A303, the juxtaposition is of stupendous antiquity and the immediacy of today, of the stones and the road, of the timeless and the absurdly hurried.
Of course, the driver on the A303 tends to slow down, take a sideways glance and is momentarily distracted from the traffic. The road’s holiday congestion on the route south-west is maddening. But that could have been relieved long ago by making it a dual carriageway.
I find it curious that EH can, on the one hand, create a mini-township of visitor car parking and an interpretation centre at the approach to Stonehenge and yet demand that £1.7bn of public money be spent guarding its customers from a glimpse of modern traffic. Has it no more pressing conservation project to support?
In the seven years since the government proposed to dig the tunnel, argument has been fierce, but expressed largely in terms of one professional elite – archaeologists – against a quasi-commercial one, English Heritage. In 2020, the planning inspectorate determined the tunnel would cause “permanent, irreversible harm” to what is a world heritage site. This was supported by Unesco but rejected by the then transport secretary, the ubiquitous Grant Shapps, frantic to show himself a man of decision. The tunnel was in turn quashed by the high court in 2021, but restored by Shapps’ successor, Mark Harper. The reason was that its benefits outweighed its harms.
Throughout the argument, the issue was essentially about archaeology. No consideration was given to the balance of pleasures afforded to 1 million Stonehenge visitors against the millions more drivers who see the stones from the road. They were assumed to be obsessed only with getting from A to B as fast as possible.
When the topographer Arthur Mee wrote his The King’s England guidebooks between the wars, it was specifically to encourage city dwellers to get in their new-bought cars and tour the English countryside. There they would appreciate its delights and use, guard and promote it as more than merely agricultural. Driving the car he saw as culturally liberating and uplifting.
Today, millions of Britons spend their time on the UK’s roads. It may or may not be a good thing, but for the time being it is a fact. They have a right to consideration. Their journeys can be an experience in themselves: educational, pleasurable, even enthralling. One such journey is the A303 past Stonehenge. The first act of any Labour administration this year must be the immediate reversal of this week’s terrible decision.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 23 February 2024 to remove a reference to Duncan Wilson, who is the director of Historic England, not of English Heritage as an earlier version said.
