Mobile Tyre Fitting in Bournemouth, 24 Hours a Day

Below the Square the Lower Gardens run on down to the pier, so the middle of the town is a green valley with steep sides and far fewer ways across it than a map suggests. The Square has been almost entirely pedestrianised since 2000, Old Christchurch Road and Commercial Road are shopping streets rather than roads, and Exeter Road and Gervis Place, the one direct link from the east side of the centre to the west, is buses, taxis and loading only.

Everything else crossing town does it on Bath Road by the pier or up on the Wessex Way.

Away from the centre the grain is Victorian and Edwardian, and it is resort grain rather than industrial. The big villas along Wimborne Road, Charminster Road and the streets running off them went up as boarding houses and private hotels for a town that lived on visitors, and most were carved into flats and bedsits long ago, so there are several cars to a frontage on roads laid out for none.

Winton, Charminster, Springbourne and Pokesdown are the result: bay-fronted terraces, short residents' permit bays and cars parked solidly down both sides. A flat there is rarely sitting in open space. It is usually wedged between a wall and the car behind, and what matters is whether there is room beside the wheel to get a jack under the car and a brace on the nuts without standing in the traffic.

Wimborne Road is Winton's high street and Christchurch Road is the A35 through Boscombe, both carrying most of the bus network, which makes them awkward places to lose air. The middle of Boscombe is a pedestrian precinct, so the A35 goes round the back of it rather than through it.

Then there are the chines. Alum Chine, Middle Chine, Durley Chine and Boscombe Chine are steep wooded ravines cut down through the cliff to the beach, and it is worth knowing which of them a car can actually get down. Alumhurst Road drops to the car park at the foot of Alum Chine and there is a sloping car park off West Overcliff Drive at Durley, but Middle Chine is a footpath, a wooded walk and a flight of steps down from the corner of West Cliff Road and Clarendon Road, and nothing on four wheels is going down it.

The roads that do go down are narrow, steeply cambered and lined with high kerbs on blind bends, and East Overcliff Drive and the cliff-top roads either side of the pier fill up from Easter onwards. A wheel put hard into a kerb while squeezing past a parked car on the way to the sand is exactly how sidewalls split and rims get bent.

A split sidewall cannot be repaired at all. A bent rim sometimes can. The only way to know which of the two you are looking at is to get the wheel off and inspect it properly.

North and east of the centre the town opens out. The Wessex Way runs past Kings Park and Littledown, where Dean Court on Kings Park Drive, the leisure centre, the county court and the Chaseside office campus all sit within about a mile of each other, and it crosses the Cooper Dean roundabout on a flyover rather than joining it, so Castle Lane and Holdenhurst Road meet underneath.

Castle Lane East runs east from there past the Royal Bournemouth Hospital, and Castle Lane West runs the other way past Castlepoint at Strouden Park. Out on the western side the A3049 Wallisdown Road is the town boundary itself, Bournemouth on one side of the tarmac and Poole on the other, and Bournemouth University's Talbot Campus and Arts University Bournemouth sit on it and push a great deal of term-time traffic onto the residential roads around Talbot Woods and Wallisdown.

Further out the A338 carries on north past the Blackwater turning for Bournemouth Airport at Hurn. The town does not really stop at its own edges in any case. Christchurch runs into it from the east and Poole from the west at County Gates in Westbourne, which is why the three are run as one council now.