It's a mile long, it's in Sussex and I walked the length of it yesterday.
The best thing about the A2025 is that it starts by the sea. We're in Lancing, eight miles west of Brighton, so the beach is a long strip of shingle punctuated by wooden groynes. I stood by the oscillating water's edge and watched the breakers rolling in, and beyond them a thin stripe of golden sky illuminating the turbines of the Rampion Offshore Wind Farm deep in the English Channel. The good people of Lancing tend not to venture onto the shingle at this time of year, instead hiding away in the beachfront Perch Cafe with hot beverages or alternatively in the Perch Gym depending on their New Year resolutions. When I was last here at May Bank Holiday children were playing by the huts on Beach Green while a hen party queued for ice creams at the kiosk, and I'm still kicking myself for failing to notice that the A2025 started a few steps away which is why I had to come back again.
The coast road is the A259 while the A27 dual carriageway runs a mile further back inland, and it's the A2025's destiny to link the two. It begins at a mini roundabout alongside a tyre fitting centre and a large seafront care home that's currently under construction, geriatrics being one of Lancing's growth industries. Connoisseurs of road numbering may like to know that only four UK road signs include the number 2025 and half of them are on the approach to this roundabout. Lovers of good spelling may not be impressed that the first shop on the A2025 believes it sells Confectionary.
This is South Street, the lesser end of Lancing's main retail offering, and also includes a few blocks of newbuild flats with balconies deftly angled to try to squeeze in a sea view. Businesses of note include a beauty salon with the ghastly name of Glamour Lengths, a hotel that doubles up as the local bistro and an artisanal sandwich shop that proudly claims 'Established 2024' but appears to have closed. Even though it's January the marvellously higgledy-piggledy chandlery at number 156 is still trying to sell 2024 tide tables for 70p, while the One Stop minimarket will probably have even less luck flogging leftover Lindt Advent calendars for £5.50. Well done to the tattoo shop for not calling itself Lancing Tattoos, whereas I reckon I'd think twice about availing myself of Lancing Dental Services.
The dominant business on the A2025 is Gardner & Scardifield, an ironmongers founded in Lancing over 100 years ago that's since spread its wings. Their main presence on South Street is a large G&S hardware repository, nextdoor is the G&S Door Showroom, round the corner G&S builders merchants, across the street G&S homewares and just down the road G&S timber supplies, the latter wafting the sweet smell of cut wood across the pavement. Starbucks and Costa do not intrude on Lancing, but Tamp & Grind have all the caffeinated froth and supposedly hilarious signage any coffee lover could want. In the newsagents the Daily Mail's pile is at least twice the height of any other paper. I fear the shuttered music shop at Instrumental Attic has sold its last banjo. The Favil Press has been bookbinding since 1921. Mr Chips does not take cards.
On the bend in the road is Lancing Parish Hall, the main community hub (and warm refuge during periods of cold). Most of the parish's tourist-facing signs claim that Lancing is England's largest village, though do not reveal the basis on which this much-contested claim is being made. Councillors here get to rule on garage conversions and rear extensions, but also whether the runway at Shoreham Airport should be widened from 18 to 23m because parish boundaries stretch all the way to the Adur estuary. Out front are two war memorials, one shifted here from the Lancing Carriage Works which built and maintained railway carriages from 1911 to 1965 but has since been entirely replaced by the equally enormous Lancing Business Park.
A copper-roofed pub called The Farmers marks the A2025's halfway point, and is also where all the interesting stuff bears off. North Street is where all the bigger shops are, from Boots to WH Smith plus the entrance to the Asda that dominates grocery shopping in BN15. It's also where the railway station has been since 1845, alongside a level crossing whose barriers all too regularly sever the main street. Back in the 1950s this inspired local planners to build a bridge just to the east which could carry through traffic safely and uninterruptedly north, so that's the way the A2025 now goes. At the foot of its gentle incline is the Gardner & Scardifield Garden Centre, suggesting they're essentially funnelling local pensions into their own coffers. And up top is a fine elevated view across coastal suburbia past Brighton & Hove Albion's futuristic training ground towards the humps of the South Downs, and maybe even a passing train.
The northern half of the A2025 is called Grinstead Lane and once had just four cottages amid a quiet area of market gardening. In the 1930s came the locally prestigious detached hideaways, some resembling Dutch barns, others bungalows, along with an ever increasing stream of traffic. Each house was named not numbered, one evocative sequence being Rosemont, Fidelis, Pippins, Florida, Thalassa, Blenheim, Glenlea, Sundene, Applesham, Sunnyside and Fernleigh. I fear that one of the bungalows has since been renamed Live Laugh Love because that was the only wording I could see out front, but maybe it's just a sign they picked up at the G&S Garden Centre. The only other business on Grinstead Lane is The Britannia, once a postwar pub but now a Harvester restaurant, which conveniently offers a takeaway option in case you don't want blow your budget on drinks.
The A2025 ends after a final flourish of bungalows at a junction on the A27, this one of a handful of roundabouts that interrupt the free flow of the dual carriageway along this section of the south coast. Plans for improving the A27 through Lancing went to consultation in 2023 but were among those jettisoned by the Chancellor last summer so this low key finale is unlikely to change any time soon. One of the A2025 roadsigns here points towards 'S L ncing' and the other towards 'S Lan ing', so maybe some local improvements would be welcome.
I suspect by now you've realised the A2025 is nothing special, except chronologically, thus I was entirely wasting my time travelling all that way to walk a lacklustre mile and write half a dozen paragraphs about it. I concur. But after I'd finished I crossed the dual carriageway and continued up the streets of North Lancing past a 17th century timberframed cottage called The Old Cottage and a 13th century parish church built of flint cobblestones with a Sussex cap-style roof. I climbed further to reach steep rows of backstreets lined by lucky houses with a panoramic view across a sea of rooftops and ultimately the sea. I crossed the boundary of the South Downs National Park, entered the car park where dogwalkers with welly boots assemble and strode on up the Celtic chalk trackway that leads to the prehistoric heights of LancingRing. I passed a mud-splattered mountainbiker, spotted the mighty chapel at Lancing College and watched a plane take off at Shoreham Airport. At the summit I enjoyed three separate panoramic views, one west along the coast towards Selsey Bill, one far inland across the High Weald and one east across Brighton towards the mighty chalk humps of the Seven Sisters.
And OK by the time I got back to the station my boots were caked in clay, and sure it would all look even more fabulous in high summer, and yes it'd probably have been better to write about this part of my day instead of the A2025, but this is why walking a distant road that just happens to have a relevant number is sometimes an excellent thing to do. Next year, alas, not so much.
