Thousands of extra tourists a day will be able to visit Stonehenge after council planners gave the go-ahead for a new 26-space coach park at the visitors' centre a mile and a half away. |
| Numbers to the increasingly popular English Heritage site Stonehenge have gone up by 300,000 in the last year, but parking has remained a problem |
English Heritage asked Wiltshire Council planners for permission to convert a field near the Airmen's Cross visitors' centre into a new coach park alongside the one built at the same time as the visitors' centre back in 2013.
Visitor numbers have rocketed up by a third at Stonehenge since the centre opened just before Christmas 2013, with 300,000 more people visiting the Wiltshire monument last year than the previous highest of a million.
Most of those come by coach on organised tours from London, but operators warned they were struggling to find the space in the coach park, and English Heritage warned coaches were turning up anyway, and dropping passengers off in potentially dangerous spots around the centre.
Planners gave English Heritage permission for the coach park but this was temporary for two years, amid fears of the impact on the landscape and the increased traffic.
The same planners turned down a similar English Heritage application to make the grassed temporary car park permanent, saying the government body had not sufficiently landscaped its plans to help hide the cars on the open spaces of Salisbury Plain.
Read the full story in the Western Daily Press: http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/New-coach-park-stones-offer-26-spaces/story-26321440-detail/story.html#ixzz3XGALPn93
Stonehenge Tourist Guide
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