Duxford "Battle of Britain" air display

Don't know if this blog has any readers in the East of England area but given my past political career before moving to Cumbria it's not impossible, so here is a travel tip.

If you are planning to go to the second day of the "Battle of Britain" air display at the Imperial War Museum's Duxford site tomorrow, I strongly recommend that you make a very early start indeed.

If you are not going to the air display, but might otherwise be travelling on the roads anywhere remotely near Duxford, and especially on the M11, A11, or A505, FIND ANOTHER ROUTE as far away from Duxford as you can manage if you can possibly do so.

A huge number of people attended today - or tried to - completely filling all the approved car parks at the venue and causing almost total gridlock on roads around the area. We were told on the radio that the event was full and the organisers had closed the gates, though when we passed the entrance there were still vehicles queuing to get in. The impact on the A505 was one of the worst transport problems I have ever experienced - significantly worse than the average effect on British roads of a foot of snow, or a bad set of M1 or M6 roadworks.

From what we saw of the air display from nearby roads during the three hours we were stuck in traffic while attempting to get through the area on the way home from holiday, it was quite magnificent. But if we had realised how completely the local transport infrastructure would fail to cope with this event, we would have chosen a different way home.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

Image
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more