A newly drafted recommendation to UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee meeting in July in India advises that the Stonehenge and Avesbury World Heritage Site should be placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger due to the threat from the A303 road scheme, approved by the U.K. government last year.and increases the warning notices previously issued by UNESCO. The report reveals that the U.K.
According to UNESCO’s report the U.K. government’s revised proposals for the Stonehenge road tunnel would “have only very modest visual benefits.” The UN cultural body said that the “currently proposed western portal and associated dual carriageway within a cutting would have significant and inappropriate adverse impacts on the physical and visual integrity of the property.”
Harper approved an application by Highways England for consent to build a 1.8-mile road tunnel to reroute a trunk road away from the standing stones on Salisbury Plain, near Amesbury, Wiltshire. Building the tunnel would be an “act of monstrous vandalism” that would be hard to justify to generations to come, said Professor Gaffney.in 2020 that “following notification of a recent archaeological find within the World Heritage Site, the deadline for the decision is to be further extended to 13 November 2020 to enable further consultation on and consideration of this matter.”
In order for the project to deliver $1.55 in benefits for every $1 spent, Highways England included a monetary value for “cultural heritage” in the costings. This was worked out by asking people how much they would pay to have the road removed from the site. Delaying the scheme had been welcomed by campaigners because pushing ahead with what many consider to be a historically-illiterate road-building scheme close to Stonehenge would, they say, be odd in the extreme, would shock people around the world—so-called “global Britain” trashing its most famous historic site isn’t a good look—and would likely to face massive protests long before the first diggers moved in....