To the average driver, the A272 is a frustrating road, full of sharp bends, traffic, speed restrictions and obstacles.
It took a Dutchman to realise that, in its modest way, the road encapsulates a lot of local beauty and history.
The book A272: An Ode To A Road – was a surprise success when it first came out ten years ago. It sold well, and not just in Sussex.
Now Pieter Boogaart and his wife Rita have extended it and, typical of their quirky sense of detail, it is now 272 pages long.
Although it is one of the main east-west roads in the county, the A272 runs from nowhere to nowhere. It starts somewhere near tiny Poundford in East Sussex and finishes 90 miles away over the Hampshire border at Sutton Scotney.
There have been roads in Sussex since the days of the Romans but most of them used to be on high ground, where visibility was good.
Over the centuries, a network of other roads gradually developed but there were problems in the Weald because of thick, clinging mud.
So the A272 stayed a series of country tracks and was not even given a name or number until roads were classified by the Government in 1922.
Road quality gradually improved and tolls were levied on users of coaches on roads like the A272, but it was often almost impassable after rain.
Little sections of what is now the A272 were shown on maps in the 18th century but there were still great gaps. Not until 1825 was the route shown between Cuckfield and Billingshurst.
The advent of the railways soon after that led to a long decline in the standard of roads and it was only the rise of the motor car a century ago that led to proper road building.
Even then, the A272 remained a narrow country road for most of its length and carried little traffic.
The biggest alterations to the road took place from the 1960s onwards, when jams were causing a serious nuisance in expanding country towns.
A series of bypasses was built to get round busy places such as Billingshurst, where the road was started in 1998, and the biggest one of all was created to take traffic out of Uckfield.
Pieter Boogaart comments: “It is ironic that roads go past the places they were created to go through. So what is gained in speed is lost in charm.”
But there is no real bypass yet for Haywards Heath, one of the biggest towns on the route, or for historic Midhurst.
Perhaps the most intractable problem is in bypassing Petworth, which is often flooded with slow-moving traffic. But any solution almost certainly involved going through the grounds of Petworth House, one of the grandest stately homes in Britain.
The Boogaarts simply cannot imagine a solution such as the one proposed through Petworth Park by West Sussex County Council in 1993, even though it included a tunnel.
They would prefer the A272 to be a slow country road, full of history as well as traffic, and add: “For car drivers on holiday, it is ideal.”
But even people who know Sussex well will be impressed at the wealth of entertaining information they have unearthed on or near the road.
* A272: An Ode To A Road by Pieter and Rita Boogaart (Pallas Athene, £19.99). To order, email info@networkbooks.biz
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