About us

Last updated: 30 March 2008

In summary

• Save Stonehenge campaigned against the British government's plan to drive a new motorway through the Stonehenge World Heritage Site from May 1999 until December 2007.
  
• We are an independent environmental group with no link to any political party.
  
• We work very closely with other environmental groups on the Stonehenge campaign, especially the various groups who make up the Stonehenge Alliance. Please note that Save Stonehenge! and the Stonehenge Alliance are, however, quite different things.
  
• We are based in the UK, but Stonehenge is a world heritage site and we consider ourselves an international pressure group. We have around 1500 people from about 30 different countries on our mailing list.

Why are we still fighting?

Along with other campaign groups, we scored a major victory in December 2002 when the British government dropped its plans to bulldoze a cut-and-cover tunnel through the Stonehenge landscape.

But the new plan is almost as bad. If people don't jump up and down and express overwhelming opposition to the highway plan, bulldozers could still roll into the Stonehenge World Heritage Site.

The British government is pretending that its main concern is to do Stonehenge a favour. It isn't. The aim of this scheme is to build a new four-lane highway. Stonehenge is in the way. So the government is doing the cheapest thing it possibly can to make it politically acceptable to bulldoze a new highway through the World Heritage Site.

Save Stonehenge says: We must not let this happen. We must not let saving a few minutes of motorists' time become more important than saving 5000 years of history. We believe Stonehenge deserves the best possible solution, not the cheapest one. And we will fight on to ensure it gets it.

Our position

There are numerous alternative plans for Stonehenge, but at the moment are not promoting any one in particular. In line with the International Council on Monuments and Sites UK (ICOMOS-UK), the official committee of archaeologists that looks out for Stonehenge and all other UK World Heritage Sites for UNESCO, we are opposing the current plan and calling for a full evaluation of all other alternative options.

Our website

Why does our website looks so dull and boring? Why no Flash animations, Java applets, and other dazzling stuff? Our site is deliberately designed to be "high-content, low-tech" so the maximum number of people can use it. It is designed to run equally well on any browser and any screen resolution using any size of any font. One reason for this is our commitment to the principle that websites should be fully accessible to everyone, including people with visual disabilities. Accessible websites bring benefits to everyone.

We very much support the concept of the Internet community. Our website is a Microsoft-free zone: it is hosted on an open-source Apache server and maintained using Linux.

Website privacy policy

Please see our separate privacy policy page.