Down memory lane

It’s heart-breaking to contrast what might-have-been with today's unholy mess. Had Thomas Sharp's plan been adopted, a new road through St Thomas’ Square would have linked High Street with Blue Boar Row (pedestrianising Minster and Silver streets). A huge Victory Hall on the Cheese Market site would have overlooked a beautiful park and riverside walk (now the central car-park), and both Salisbury Library and the Museum would have occupied Fisherton Mill.

A new bus station would have been built near the railway station, and a link from Crane Street to Fisherton Street via Water Lane would have completed the inner by-pass circle. Harnham would have been linked to the Devizes Road via Cherry Orchard Lane.

And the outer by-pass? The obvious one: a southern and eastern route linking the A36 at Wilton with the Blandford, Bournemouth, Southampton and London roads. All that was advocated immediately after World War Two. As it says on the t-shirt, the older I get the better it was.

Who bares wins

Salisbury Studio Theatre’s production of Calendar Girls, which runs from October 3-6 and 9-12, looks like being a sell-out. The tickets (obtainable from the Tourist Information Office) are already going fast.

Salisbury’s is the 10th am-dram production of the play to be staged so far this year, but many, many more are planned nationwide thanks to the play’s publishing company, Samuel French. They’re hoping to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the greatest number of productions of a play to be staged in a calendar year (geddit?).

The original calendar girls from Rylestone & District Women’s Institute in Yorkshire stripped to raise funds after one of their members lost her husband to leukaemia. (Nowadays part of the royalties paid by companies staging the play go to Leukaemia Research.)

The Studio Theatre is also supporting a good cause, with a Gala Night performance on Saturday, October 6. Tickets are £12 apiece, and every penny will go to Salisbury Hospital’s Pembroke Suite cancer unit. You might like to put the date in your diary. We all know someone who’s fallen victim to the big C.

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