24 Hour Mobile Tyre Fitting in Salisbury and the Villages Around It

That shape decides how the place drives, because there are only so many ways over the water: traffic funnels onto the Avon crossings at Fisherton Street and Crane Bridge Road, and again south of the centre at Harnham, where Bishop Bingham put the Ayleswade Bridge across the river in 1244 and it is standing yet. Churchill Way loops the old centre as a ring road carrying the A36 itself, and because Salisbury has never been given a bypass, freight running between the Southampton docks and Bath shares that loop with everybody trying to reach the Maltings.

Inside the ring road the street plan is medieval. The city was laid out in a grid of chequers when it came down off the hill in the thirteenth century, which is why Milford Street, Brown Street and Salt Lane are narrow, one way in places and parked solid end to end. On charter market days, Tuesday and Saturday, the Market Place fills with stalls and everything routes around it.

The Cathedral Close is a world of its own again, walled and gated, with the gates shut against traffic overnight, so a car left inside after they close is not somewhere a van can simply drive up to. None of that stops a wheel being changed. It does mean the exact spot the car is standing in is worth more to us than the postcode is.

Outside the ring road the ground changes. This is chalk country, and chalk country means flint. The lanes over the downs into the Chalke valley towards Broad Chalke, the byways climbing onto Salisbury Plain past Old Sarum and the field entrances along the Woodford valley all shed broken flint onto the verge, and farm traffic drags more of it out onto the metalled road behind it.

A flint edge slices rather than punching, in a way a nail never does, and a slice through the shoulder or the sidewall cannot be repaired legally, because repairs are confined to the central tread area. Where a puncture can be repaired safely and legally we will repair it. Where it cannot, the tyre comes off the rim and you are shown why.

The edges of the city climb, and the middle of it sits in water. There is the pull up Harnham Hill towards the hospital at Odstock, the ridge at Old Sarum where the settlement stood before it came down to the river in 1220, and the long haul over Pepperbox Hill on the Southampton road. At the bottom, the Maltings and the central car parks sit low beside the Avon, and the water meadows below the Town Path at Harnham are under water for a good part of the winter, which is exactly what they were dug to do.

Between the two, somewhere firm and level to leave a car with a flat tyre is harder to come by here than the map makes it look.