A303: Highway to the Sun
by Tom Fort
14 September 2024
I’ve seen this book around bookshops for years. The subject matter is a road in south & southwest England, and this kind of intersection of history and geography and nostalgia culture is the kind of thing that I enjoy but I’ve never been tempted to buy it because I don’t really know the road in question. I’ve certainly travelled bits of it at different times, mostly as a child, but it’s not something I know well. Spotting it on the library shelf though was enough to make me pick it up and give it a go.
It turned out that my first impression was correct and I should have left it alone. I feel like the book should have stood up to my not having a close personal connection to the road. I’ve travelled many other roads across England and I feel it should have resonated with me by proxy. I like random bits of local history even when I don’t know the places very well. I don’t really know why this didn’t work for me.
Partly it’s that even though the book covers a load of different topics there’s a big emphasis on Stonehenge, which is entirely understandable, and as someone who grew up in England I don’t really know what I have against Stonehenge. I’m pretty certain I’ve only seen Stonehenge from the road as a child, presumably the A303. And I should probably remedy that sometime. When I lived in Wiltshire, not very far from the A303 in fact, for a while as a child, we would visit the stone circle at Avebury and everyone told me it was bigger and better than Stonehenge, and it was much more open access. So still as an adult, many years later, my eyes glaze over at the mention of Stonehenge. And I know it’s not really fair of me to judge the book (or Stonehenge!) on that basis. But that’s my own personal history.
Yet the book opens with a section about Little Chef which is, for reasons I cannot truly fathom, one of the shining beacons of my childhood. And it was written before the restaurant chain’s demise and this edition was revised after it which makes it all the more interesting to me. So basically I’m concluding that the book is squarely aimed at an audience like me but not exactly me, and I’m kind of disappointed in myself at not enjoying it more and the M5 will continue to be my own highway to holidays.
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