RSPB attacks Stonehenge plan

230605 - NEWS Update        230605 - NEWS Update

"...barbaric... No other country in the world would contemplate treating a site which is a world icon in such a way." Lord Kennet

 More prehistory here www.menhirslibres.org 

160603: 1. Urgent: Stonehenge needs YOU to stop massively destructive highway! 

            2. How you can help 

1. Urgent: Stonehenge needs YOU to stop massively destructive highway! It's mid-June 2003 and the Summer Solstice will soon be here. That's normally a time for great celebration at Stonehenge. But this year things will be a little different. The British government has just  published the full details of how it plans to bulldoze a new four-lane highway through the world-famous heritage site. 

British environmental groups, under the banner of the Stonehenge Alliance, have roundly condemned the scheme as "massively destructive". Save Stonehene! urgently needs your help, once again, for the next stage of our campaign. 

Please read on! Last time we wrote to you, back in December, the British government had announced it was softening its original plan to bulldoze the road straight through the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. The original plan would have sunk the middle part of the road into a so-called "cut-and-cover" tunnel (a very deep bulldozed trench with a roof added on top and grassed over afterwards). Thanks to huge public opposition from people such as you, the cut-and-cover plan is no more. But what we have now is not very much better. The shocking details of the new scheme were released on June 3. The British government and its roadbuilding wing, the Highways Agency, is still promoting its plan as an "improvement" for Stonehenge, with glossy artist's impressions of wide open green fields and empty local roads. The mockup of the new tunnel entrance, for example, shows a road with only two carriageways instead of four and absolutely no traffic on the new road whatsoever! It's all highly misleading and very far from the truth. The British government talks about its plan to remove "20th century clutter from Stonehenge"; what it doesn't mention is its determination to replace it with "21st century clutter" that in our view will be even more destructive and intrusive. 

The facts are these: The new highway would be 7.7 miles (12.4 km) long. A small part of this new road (1.3 miles or 2.1 km, about one sixth of it) would be sunk into a tunnel bored (drilled) under the part of the World Heritage Site nearest to the stone circle. But that still leaves over six miles of massively destructive new road being bulldozed at ground level, or in cuttings (deep trenches) through the priceless landscape around Stonehenge. 

Let's make this totally clear: THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT STILL INTENDS TO BULLDOZE OVER TWO MILES OF BRAND NEW, 4-LANE HIGHWAY AT GROUND LEVEL THROUGH THE INTERNATIONALLY IMPORTANT STONEHENGE WORLD HERITAGE SITE. The new road would also involve massive destructive at Longbarrow Crossroads, the archaeologically sensitive area on the western edge of the World Heritage Site. Let's not pretend that this new highway is anything to do with protecting Stonehenge. It is being built because the British government wants to create a massive new highway from London to the West Country and Stonehenge, unfortunately, is in the way. Don't be fooled by the glossy new photos of grass and trees. 

The bottom line is this: The new Stonehenge plan is a Trojan horse that will bulldoze four lanes of massive new road into the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. Stonehenge needs YOU! The British government has released its official plan in draft form (the so-called "Draft Orders") for "public consultation". We urgently need hundreds of people to object to this plan BEFORE 4TH SEPTEMBER 2003 so that the government will hold a public inquiry (a bit like a court case at which the merits of the plan can be discussed in detail). 

What we need you to do is very simple. Please fill in and send off the standard letter of objection attached below to the Stonehenge Project Team, Highways Agency, Zone 2-05/K, Temple Quay House, 2 The Square, Temple Quay, BRISTOL BS1 6HA, UK. Or you can send it by fax to (from UK) 0117 372 8238; (from overseas) Your international dialling code + 44 117 372 8238. Please DO NOT send emails; they will ignore them. By all means write your own letter or modify ours however you wish, but be sure to make clear that you object to the plan. You can download the standard objection letter in various word-processed formats (plain text TXT, rich-text format RTF, Microsoft Word DOC, or HTML) from our website at http://www.savestonehenge.org.uk/actnow.html 

2. How you can help Our website has lots of other ideas on how you can help the campaign. Small donations of money are a huge help and our campaign would have to stop without them. We have no overheads or office costs, no paid staff and everyone works on the campaign for free. Even our website is hosted free. 

We are extremely cost-effective: every single pound/dollar we raise goes directly toward the campaign to Save Stonehenge! If you'd like to make a secure online donation, please go to http://www.savestonehenge.org.uk/donate.html Thanks as always for your support. Please get writing those objection letters straight away! Happy Solstice and have a great summer! Chris for Save Stonehenge!

160103: The Ministerial announcement on 10 December 2002 proposing a lamentably short 2.1km bored tunnel for the A303 at Stonehenge has gathered few supporters apart from English Heritage, who may understandably have been expected to recommended it to Ministers in the first place. Of course, we should be pleased that bored rather than cut-and-cover engineering has now been accepted and that the cost of bored tunnelling is now far less than it was. It seems, however, that it would still be necessary to break the surface in Stonehenge Bottom to achieve an acceptable angle of slope in tunnelling from King Barrow Ridge.

Following the December road announcement, ICOMOS-UK, in a strongly worded statement, said that it was concerned that the proposal ‘does not go far enough in healing the scars in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site landscape or in making it available overall for people to enjoy in peace and quiet.’ It drew attention to the fact that ‘The Stonehenge WHS is a key part of the nation’s cultural capital: that capital needs optimising not compromising.’

The CBA’s latest Stonehenge position statement concludes, on currently available evidence, ‘The long tunnel appears to be the best way of achieving the enduring environmental benefits that the long-term vision for the Stonehenge landscape requires.’ (British Archaeology 68, December 2002)

These two welcome pronouncements, which clearly echo the resolve of the National Trust’s Council to support a long bored tunnel (resoundingly endorsed by its members at their November AGM), suggest a significant turning point.

It would be interesting to know why the Ministerial decision was for the cheap option (£183m including VAT) for the proposed 2.1km scheme, against an estimated £400m for a long tunnel (4.5km). As a ‘Special Environmental Scheme’, it might have been supposed that the whole environment of the WHS would have been the first consideration. The sum still needed to do the better job (for the benefit of all mankind and future generations) compares favourably with the sum apparently required by the same Department for simply preparing a bid for a London venue for the 2012 Olympics. The cost of constructing any Olympic facilities, should a bid be successful, is already said to be £4bn and rising. This makes a nonsense of penny pinching at Stonehenge where we are reasonably certain of the costs involved and where the relevant management infrastructure for completing the work is in place.

Moreover, the A303 decision does nothing to solve the knotty problem of visitor-access. A planning application for the new visitor-centre may be expected in the spring and visitor-access to the landscape will need to be an integral part of those proposals. English Heritage now presumably finds itself in an interesting position vis-à-vis the National Trust, its partners in the Stonehenge Project. Will the visitor-access scheme be based on a short tunnel following English Heritage’s stated priority concern for the core area of the WHS? Or will it be more sensibly oriented on a long tunnel scheme, favoured by the Trust and the Management Plan, that would allow more flexibility, and better enjoyment of the whole site without further damaging it?

We are reminded that Lottery funding for the visitor-centre will not be forthcoming until the outcome of the A303 Inquiry is known. There can be no certainty that the Government- backed road scheme will be implemented as currently proposed. Why then the hurry to make a visitor-centre planning application? On present form, there could be changes of plan over the next few years.

An interesting paper by Ian Baxter and Christopher Chippindale has appeared recently in Current Archaeology (No. 183, January 2003). They propose a low-cost, no-further-damage ‘brownfield option’ for improved visitor-facilities in the present location, giving immediate access to what visitors want to see. Their scheme would not, however, rid the landscape of a sea of parked cars, and an accompanying but unlabelled map hints at a tour of the monuments via a circuitous routeway that might in itself provide a new and extensive monument to blight the landscape.

Meanwhile, archaeological and environmental organisations, including Rescue representatives, are considering possible representation of objection at an A303 Inquiry expected towards the end of this year. We will continue to keep members informed. Kate Fielden

141202: Stonehenge saved? Not quite. Much has happened since we last wrote to you back in September. As you'll recall, we wrote to ask your help in stopping a four-lane highway from being bulldozed through the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. The plan was to create a brand new and very wide road using a method called cut-and-cover: gouge a deep trench, add a roof on top... and ask questions later. We also alerted you to the position of Britain's National Trust, a charity that owns most of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, which had initially supported the road scheme. 

Thanks in part to the many emails and letters you sent, some remarkable things have happened in the last few weeks. After looking carefully at all the evidence, the National Trust made a very courageous decision to change its position and firmly opposed the cut-and-cover road it had once supported. Opposition also came from ICOMOS-UK, the committee of archaeologists charged with safeguarding the World Heritage Site on behalf of UNESCO. Other groups, notably the Stonehenge Alliance of environmental, archaeological, and transport organizations chaired by Lord Kennet, continued to make a powerfully persuasive case against cut-and-cover. Well miracles do happen. On Wednesday of this week, the British's government's Transport and Culture ministries announced that they had changed their minds about the road: it would now be bored underneath the central part of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site instead of arrogantly bulldozed right throught it. Good news indeed for Stonehenge. (You can read more about the announcement in Maev Kennedy's article from the UK newspaper, The Guardian, here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,857552,00.html 

But there is a snag. The new tunnel will be just 1.3 miles (2.1 km) long. That means, outside the tunnel section, huge cuttings will still have to be bulldozed through part of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. Many people -- including Save Stonehenge -- refuse to stomach the idea of bulldozers trashing the World Heritage Site and we simply do not accept that a short, bored tunnel is the best we can do. ICOMOS-UK does not support the short bored tunnel. The National Trust has said it wants to know why the government won't build a longer tunnel (as the owner of the land, it still has the power to veto the road altogether). Now we don't want to appear ungrateful to the British government: they have, after all, agreed to find an extra 30 million pounds (45 million dollars) on this highway. 

Thank you British government. But let's be clear about this: The British government is pretending that its main concern is to do Stonehenge a favour. It isn't. The aim of this scheme is to build a new four-lane highway. Stonehenge is, unfortunately, in the way. So the British government is doing the cheapest thing it possibly can to make it politically acceptable to build a new highway through a World Heritage Site. It's pretending to go out of its way to protect Stonehenge, which has been there for 5000 years, by spending an extra ?30 million pounds. But it has ?5.5 billion to spend on transport. And it spent ?800 million pounds on London's Millennium Dome, an ill-fated, much-hated plastic tent that was only used for a year. 

We believe Stonehenge deserves the best possible solution, not the cheapest one. And we will continue to fight to ensure it gets it. Other, longer tunnels need to be considered; new routes have been proposed that take the highway right outside the World Heritage Site; and there are public transportation options too. All these things must be looked at first before we take drastic, irreversible steps. After all, Stonehenge is 5000 years old; the motor car is about 100 years old. Will we still be driving automobiles in 100, 500, or 1000 years time? Will future generations curse our short-term, blinkered thinking in bulldozing a new road through Stonehenge? So our campaign to secure the future Stonehenge really deserves will go on. You wouldn't expect any less of us, would you?

What happens next? In the Spring of 2003, the British government will publish the official legal documents (known as Draft Orders) that will allow it to proceed with the scheme. Save Stonehenge and a number of other groups will formally oppose these orders. And there will then be a public inquiry -- a cross between a public meeting and a court case where supporters and opponents of the road can argue their cases. We will keep you posted. 

Please support our campaign. Do you buy things from Amazon.com? If you follow a direct link from our website, we make 5-15% commission on whatever you spend -- and it won't cost you any extra: http://www.savestonehenge.org.uk/stonebooks.html 

Many people have written asking to make donations to our campaign. We're delighted to announce that we've finally set up a secure online donation system on our website, using the PayPal system: http://www.savestonehenge.org.uk/donate.html  It works in the UK, the US, and hopefully in most other countries too. Every penny/cent we raise goes straight into the campaign. We have 0% admin and bureaucracy costs! 

Thanks, as always, for your support and Season's Greetings, Save Stonehenge!

When the government ministers announce their decision, they will do so in a fanfare of crass publicity. Their spin doctors will attempt to convince the British public and the rest of the world that building four lanes of new road through a World Heritage Site is somehow a benefit. In reality, their plan is an attempt to build a massive new highway around a pesky, troublesome monument that just happens to be in the way. In reality, they don't give a stuff about Stonehenge.

To proceed with this plan, the government vitally needs the support of a British charity called the National Trust that owns the land around Stonehenge. The National Trust gained that land in the 1920s after launching a major public financial appeal: "We have not two Stonehenges, and our generation will be vilified by all posterity if we  allow the surroundings of this monument, the frontispiece to English history, to be ruined beyond repair". As we write to you, the National Trust's ruling council and its executive director, Fiona Reynolds, seem likely to approve selling off "their land" -- the very same land that people gave money for them to preserve -- to the roadbuilders. Not for the first time, the National Trust is completely out of touch with public opinion on this issue. So now we need YOUR help!

We need you to DELUGE the British government and FLOOD the National Trust with your letters. Write them from the heart, write them with passion, write them with hope, write them in anger. Write them however you like. You may not get the chance to write them again: their ears will be closed to everything except the sound of traffic. If you need inspiration, take a look at the heartfelt things people have been writing on our message board: http://www.savestonehenge.org.uk/yoursay.html You don't need to write pages. Just "I object to your plan to build a new road through the Stonehenge World Heritage Site" on a postcard would do.

Here are the addresses you need.  Please write one letter and send copies to the other people.

Please don't send emails; they just ignore them!

Please write IMMEDIATELY  

Any other action you might like to take is up to you.

THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH for your support! Save Stonehenge!

Website: http://www.savestonehenge.org.uk/

General: info@savestonehenge.org.uk

Media: press@savestonehenge.org.uk