Stonehenge's visitor's centre is finally open. Although English Heritage cares for the monument, thousands of surrounding acres belong to the National Trust, and new signboards are being installed in the fields explaining the barrows, avenues and mounds which speckle the landscape.The hideous high security fence has already gone, and the returfed Months of landscaping are still to come, but gradually the old underpass, car park, the sinister underground loos which regularly flooded, and the sales kiosks will be demolished.English Heritage expects the time people spend at the site to rise from the present half an hour – or less – to at least two hours, and negotiations are continuing to persuade the tour bus operators who bring thousands of tourists to the site to rearrange their schedules.The new displays include a 360-degree projection, based on a minutely detailed laser scan of the stones, which catapult visitors through millennia and seasons, from sunrise to snowfall, lark song to traffic noise.The permanent exhibition includes many objects found at the site never exhibited before, and loans from the museums in Salisbury and Devizes.
You will need to book your timed tickets in advance. Visitors will be able to experience a virtual sunrise in the £27m facility. He arrived long before a century of arguing about what and where the visitor centre should be, before the endless planning enquiries about burying, closing or rerouting the roads, before designs created were scrapped, funding plans were announced and abandoned. Located 1.5 miles to the west of the stone circle at Airman’s Corner, just within the World Heritage Site but out of sight of the monument, the Designed by Visitors will be collected by Land Rovers drawing surprisingly elegant little carriages – English Heritage staff have been using them as quiet, comfortable meeting rooms to escape the building site – and taken to the stones. "I think this building is elegant, beautiful, and above all fit for purpose," he said. Pre-booking online is not only advised – and will also slightly reduce the £14.90 admission fee, almost twice the current £8 charge – but will be essential at peak times.The shuttles will stop halfway at a little wood – one of the myriad abandoned alternative sites for the centre – offering visitors the option of walking across fields to the monument, or continuing on to be dropped a short stroll from the stones. Stonehenge Visitor Centre welcomes you with a cafe, ticket office, shop, car and coach park, a museum displaying priceless loans from Salisbury Museum and Wiltshire Museum and a changing special exhibition featuring collections which have recently included contemporary art, photographs, Stonehenge bric-a-brac and archaeological treasures from museums around the world. "We can't know how, but it was special to him." What's three decades of planning compared to the 5,000-year-old site it supports? But something kept drawing him to return to this place," Lunt said. Visitors are expected to rise from around 1 million to 1.25 million in the first year of the new centre, and in high season a shuttle should be heading down the road every four minutes. visitor centre Stonehenge Visitor Centre welcomes you with a cafe, ticket office, shop, car and coach park, a museum displaying priceless loans from Salisbury Museum and Wiltshire Museum and a changing special exhibition featuring collections which have recently included contemporary art, photographs, Stonehenge bric-a-brac and archaeological treasures from museums around the world. "The skull is very fine, suggesting he was a handsome young man, and I was determined that the reconstruction should show that. Tickets are available to book now. "I think it is a great work of art. Gradually most of the missing bones were tracked down, and finally the skull was found mistakenly stored among bones from Pompeii, but still scribbled with notes by the original excavator, amateur archaeologist Dr John Thurnham. Soups, sandwiches, cornish pasties and sweet treats including our famous rock cakes, catering for most dietary requirements including gluten free and vegan.Browse a wide range of souvenirs, clothing, books and gifts to provide memories of your visit, many made in the UK exclusively for Stonehenge.
Over 250 archaeological objects and treasures discovered in the landscape, are on display, ranging from jewellery, pottery and tools to ancient human remains.A wonderful collection of personal holiday snaps that give a fascinating insight into how people’s visits to Stonehenge have changed.Watch the seasons pass and take a trip through time with our incredible audio-visual 360 degree view from inside the stones.Walk amongst our Neolithic houses to imagine how people lived 4,500 years ago. Following a gestation period that seemed as drawn-out as a Viking Saga, the new visitor’s In 2001, by which time this gateway was cluttered with unslightly Portakabins, Denton Corker Marshall was commissioned to build a new visitor centre and exhibition space. Obviously when the hair and colouring was added he could have been made to look like some horrible shaggy caveman dragging his knuckles along the ground, but instead there is a delicacy, a fineness to him – when he was still bald, before the hair was added, he looked like any commuter you'd meet on a train into London. Why not browse our