24/7 Mobile Tyre Fitting in Chichester and the Manhood Peninsula

The verges are narrow or absent in places, the slip roads back up at peak, and there is no hard shoulder to retreat to when something lets go at speed. Fishbourne and Bognor Bridge carry the worst collision records of the five, which is not a comforting thought when you are standing next to a wheel.

Inside the walls the city is still the Roman grid it started as. North, South, East and West Street run out from the Market Cross to the four gates, and though the gates themselves came down long ago the names stayed on the ring road at Northgate, Eastgate, Southgate and Westgate. The cathedral sits in the block between West Street and South Street with its bell tower standing apart from it, the only detached medieval bell tower left at any English cathedral and about the easiest landmark in the city to give over the phone.

It is a lovely place to walk around and an awkward one to work in. Several of those streets are pedestrianised or access-restricted through the day, the side streets off them are one-way and tight, and the Avenue de Chartres multi-storey is signed at 1.93 metres, which stops a fitting van at the barrier. Add the level crossings at Basin Road and on Stockbridge Road, which is the A286 and the main southern way into the centre, coming down several times an hour and holding everything behind them while they do, and a short hop across the city is rarely short.

South of the bypass the land flattens out into the Manhood Peninsula and the road network thins to almost nothing. The B2145 through Hunston and Sidlesham is the only road in or out of Selsey, so one set of temporary lights on it is felt the length of the village. The A286 runs south only as far as Birdham and stops there, handing the last few miles to the B2179 for West Wittering and the B2198 for Bracklesham, which means that on a hot Saturday the entire beach queue is stacked onto two B-roads and backs up toward the Stockbridge roundabout.

West of the city the harbour villages have their own rules. Shore Road at Bosham goes under at high water, deeply enough for roughly two hours either side of it that the standing local advice is not to leave a car anywhere near the water in that window, and people who parked at low tide come back to find the sea over the sills. None of this is far in miles. All of it takes longer than the map suggests.

North of the A27 the ground rises straight into the South Downs. The A286 climbs through Lavant toward Singleton and on to Midhurst, while the A285 leaves the bypass at the Portfield roundabout and runs up through Westhampnett and Temple Bar to Halnaker and over Duncton Hill on its way to Petworth - twelve miles that turn up again and again in national counts of the worst roads in Britain for serious and fatal collisions.

Between those two roads sit Goodwood, the motor circuit down at Westhampnett and the racecourse up on the ridge above it. On a Festival of Speed or Revival weekend the traffic orders shut Claypit Lane, Madgwick Lane and New Road eastwards to the A285, and the whole city feels it. The rest of the year these are unlit downland lanes with flint banks instead of verges, which is a poor place to be changing a wheel in the dark.