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 Stonehenge is open to visit. 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. 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. Stonehenge Visitor Centre Funding cancellation for the planned Stonehenge Visitor Centre. "The skull is very fine, suggesting he was a handsome young man, and I was determined that the reconstruction should show that. It proposed a massive earthwork a few miles away that
Tickets are available to book now. "He was a sad specimen when Lunt first saw him in the stores of the Duckworth laboratory at Cambridge University, missing his feet, hands, forearms, and head. Denton Corker Marshall’s new Stonehenge Visitor Centre opens its doors on 18th December, inviting more than one million visitors every year to experience the transformed ancient site. Visitors will be able to experience a virtual sunrise in the £27m facility. 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. 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.
"I think it is a great work of art. Photograph: Chris Ison/PA