Its not every day that I wake up and think “I must go to Andover”. Having now been I think that is probably a good thing. It got off to a bad start when someone aspiring to be an Essex boy tried to scam me for his parking money – the walk from the car park to the town centre didn’t improve my level of hope, the bus station seemed to be full of bus drivers being utterly incompetant at driving around each other.
Its an odd town, full of Wilkinsons and Job Centres at one end of the spectrum with multitudes of estate agents at the other, and nothing in between selling the kinds of things that normal people need on an everyday basis.
After I had exhausted the town centre (the highlight was a man standing on a step ladder in a river – its not often you see someone in waders cleaning third floor windows) I headed out to the ring road where I discovered a bunch of out-of-town shops clustered around a roundabout. As is typical with these things its nearly impossible to get from one to another on foot, this though was one of the worst examples I’ve seen. My total score circumnavigating the roundabout was two fences (one with mesh on it to stop people climbing over), three hedges, two significant puddles, two pedestrian crossings, one DVD player and one phone charger
Trying to escape the town was interesting too, they seem to have taken the idea that towns have ring roads without understanding either that it should be a ring or that it should go around the town centre.
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