SUPPORTERS of the Stonehenge Alliance plan to protest with banners and placards outside the British Museum in London on Thursday.

They will stage their protest outside the museum’s main entrance on Great Russell Street from 12.30 to 1:30pm on the opening day of the British Museum’s major exhibition “The World of Stonehenge”.

Their aim is to warn visitors that the Stonehenge World Heritage Site near Salisbury is still under threat from a £1.7 billion major road scheme.

They will be handing out fliers to explain the threat to the public from the Government’s A303 Stonehenge road-widening project.

It would move the A303 into a two-mile (3.2km) tunnel under the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, completing the removal of traffic begun with the 2012 closure of the A344 road.

The scheme includes a new dual carriageway through the WHS, with deep cuttings to twin-bore tunnels for part of its length, along with a massive flyover beside Blick Mead Mesolithic site on the eastern WHS boundary. 

There is also a motorway-scale interchange at the western boundary, close to Longbarrow Roundabout and the magnificent Winterbourne Stoke prehistoric barrow cemetery.

The protesters say the road scheme has been rejected at every stage by the majority of those responding to public consultations; the team of five senior Planning Inspectors who formally examined it; and UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, who threaten loss of WHS status if the project goes ahead unaltered.

Even though permission for it was quashed by the High Court in July 2021, the Transport Secretary Grant Shapps now intends to re-determine the scheme.

Tom Holland, Stonehenge Alliance president, said: “Enough is enough.  It is time for the Government to accept its defeat in the High Court gracefully and put the white elephant that it has been threatening to unleash on Britain’s most sacred prehistoric landscape out of its misery for good.”

The British Museum’s major exhibition considers Stonehenge in its wider context at a time when its surrounding landscape is under threat of what the examiners predicted: “permanent, irreversible harm, critical to the OUV [Outstanding Universal Value] would occur, affecting not only our own, but future generations.”

The Stonehenge Alliance is supported by Ancient Sacred Landscape Network; Campaign to Protect Rural England; Friends of the Earth; Rescue, the British Archaeological Trust; and Transport Action Network and many individuals throughout the world.

The World of Stonehenge exhibition is being hosted by the British Museum from Thursday February 17 until July 17.

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