The Magic Roundabout

Now I know my little rant about English road signs may lead you to think that this is just because I am a confused Australian but I feel finally vindicated after reading an article in today’s paper from Jeremy Clarkson (you may know him from lesser roles in ‘Top Gear’ and ‘Who stole my car’). I feel I must repeat his quote below:

“Eventually I arrived at the biggest roundabout in the world looking for signs to the next town on my list. Basingstoke. There aren’t any. The council and the Highways Agency have decided instead to list a number of villages no one’s ever heard of. So, using the sun, I took a stab and miraculously ended up on the right road. Which, with no warning whatsoever, became the wrong road.

I wonder sometimes how much of the traffic on our roads today is made up of people in strange towns trying to make some kind of sense of the signs.

There’s one in west London that says the right turn ahead will take you to Clapham. Yes it will, but it will also take you to Earls Court, Fulham, Chelsea, Putney, Brixton, Brighton, France and the Kamchatka peninsula in eastern Russia. Why single out Clapham?

Then there are one-way systems. The day before my four-hour trip across the southeast I was in Lyndhurst, down there in the New Forest. You arrive at a set of lights and want to go straight on, but instead you’re forced to go left, into a one-way system of such mind-boggling complexity and such length that halfway round most people pull over and try to will themselves to die.

And have you been to Stroud? You arrive from the west and no matter what you do you end up in the railway station car park. And Basingstoke, where you are sucked off a dual carriageway, whether you like it or not, and wind up in a multi-storey car park. And you have to pay to get out again.”

I do wonder if this is a conspiracy and that the Highways Agency is actually run by those companies that sell in-car navigation systems. Here is an example from Swindon. I am guessing they call it the Magic roundabout because, like Harry Houdini, you are going to need some form of magic if you are ever going to escape.