from The Salisbury Museum Blog, by volunteer Alan Clarke.
What fun it is looking through old photographs and finding the unexpected. Would you ever have expected double decker buses to be routed along Dews Road near the railway station?
This photograph shows the building where the Salisbury Times was printed, in Dews Road. The Salisbury Times was a full size newspaper which was a rival to the Salisbury Journal before the Salisbury Journal eventually bought it out.
Back in the days of this photograph, all the town buses were double-deckers with conductors as well as drivers. Walking along Dews Road today, the Times building is still there, now put to another use. But the road still seems too narrow for double decker buses to get through.
The photograph below shows New Canal on a Tuesday where all the buses from all the local villages used to park. People would make several journeys from their coach to the market with purchases, a procedure not possible if the coaches were parked further away from the market.
Until quite recently there were 14 different coaches using the New Canal on a Tuesday. Unfortunately, the council was only aware of the Wiltshire ones (very few, as most came from Dorset or Hampshire) and thus removed almost all of the spaces.
Out of the city, the main road going north from Amesbury (Countess Road) crosses the river Avon in a valley. The A303 now runs along this valley, splitting Countess Road in two via a roundabout.
This photograph shows what happened when the river Avon used to be in flood. It also shows that bus services still carried on through the floods and provided a vital service to those on foot who would have had difficulty getting to and from Amesbury without the bus.
Could it happen again today? I expect it could well flood, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope that the buses would keep on running.
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