# Bournemouth, Dorset

URL: https://performanceandprestige.co.uk/car-hire/bournemouth

Performance & Prestige has no depot, branch or rental counter in Bournemouth and holds no premises there. Every lease is delivered to an address you choose and collected from it afterwards.

The interesting half of this delivery area is not Bournemouth itself but the water either side of it: Sandbanks, Canford Cliffs, Branksome Park and the Poole harbour shore, where the houses sit behind pines on sandy ground and a good number of the drives are wider than the roads serving them. We deliver there, along the Bournemouth clifftop and the chines, out to Christchurch and Highcliffe, and inland to Wimborne, Ferndown and the New Forest edge. Sandbanks is the constraint everybody underestimates - it is a peninsula with one road on and off it, and in summer that road does not flow. The Forest and the Purbecks are both on the doorstep, which is the real argument for keeping something good here. We hold no premises in Dorset and there is nothing for you to come to.

Typical delivery: The peninsula and the season set this. Banks Road is the only way on and off Sandbanks, it is narrow, and between late spring and September it carries beach traffic that turns a short distance into a long one - so a summer handover down there is set for early morning rather than the middle of the day. Elsewhere the addresses are mostly drives and the planning is ordinary. If the chain ferry is part of your plan, we want to know before the day rather than on it. A person puts the window to you and it holds once you have agreed it.

Two things here that catch cars out and neither is traffic. The first is sand: it blows across the coast roads and the approaches to the beaches constantly, and a thin film of it on tarmac behaves exactly like loose gravel under a wide cold tyre. The second is the parking surface - several properties on the sand spit and around the harbour have drives laid on compacted sand or shingle rather than a hard base, and it goes soft after rain. Salt air is the third, and it is a cosmetic nuisance rather than a hazard, though it is worth knowing before the car spends a term a hundred yards from the water.

Postcode areas covered: BH.

## How does a delivery to Sandbanks actually work?

Carefully, and usually early. The peninsula is served by a single road with parking along much of it, the houses are close-packed with short frontages, and a transporter that stops in the wrong place blocks everything behind it for as long as it is there. So the last leg is driven and we agree the exact spot beforehand rather than hoping for a gap. Out of season it is a straightforward driveway handover like anywhere else. In August it is the busiest small road in Dorset, and setting the time for eight in the morning changes the whole character of it.

## Should I take the car on the chain ferry to Studland?

It is the short way into Purbeck and it is worth doing, with two cautions. The loading ramp changes angle with the tide, which is not a thing a low front splitter enjoys being surprised by, so look at it before you commit the nose to it. And the queue in summer can be long enough that the road round through Wareham is quicker despite being several times the distance. The alternative route is no hardship: the A351 through Corfe Castle is a fine drive in its own right and the castle appears over a ridge in a way that never quite gets old.

## What do I need to know about driving in the New Forest?

That the animals are not fenced in and have right of way in every sense that matters. Ponies, cattle, pigs and donkeys wander on to unfenced roads at any hour, they are hardest to see at dusk and after dark, and they do not move for a car. The speed limits across the open forest reflect that and are enforced. Collisions there are a serious matter for the animal and an expensive one for anything low and wide. Drive it in daylight, take the B roads slowly, and treat it as somewhere to look at rather than somewhere to press on.

## Where are the good roads once you are past the forest?

West and south-west. The A351 into Purbeck, the road up on to the ridge above Corfe, and the coast lanes towards Kimmeridge and Lulworth are the local ones, and the range roads through the Lulworth area close when firing is taking place, with the open times published in advance - check before you set out rather than arriving at a locked gate. Further out, the B3081 over Zig-Zag Hill near Shaftesbury is the best single stretch of road in the county, and the Dorset lanes between Blandford and Sherborne are quiet, rolling and almost never busy.

## Which weeks fill the town up?

The August air festival is the big one and it does not just fill the seafront: the clifftop roads, the approaches from the Wessex Way and the parking across the whole central area go together for several days, with road closures published beforehand. School holidays generally turn the coast road into a slow one from mid-morning. Neither stops a delivery or a collection. Both mean we set the time deliberately and, on the Sandbanks side, well before the beach traffic builds. Send the dates with the postcode and we will say what is on.

## Is a coastal address a problem over a three-month term?

Not a problem, but worth planning for. Salt air marks brightwork and glass over time, blown sand gets everywhere on the spit, and a car left out under pines picks up resin and needles that are far easier to remove in the first week than the fourth. Covered parking or a garage solves all three. If the car will live outside within sight of the water for the whole of the term, say so when we agree the vehicle, because it is a sensible thing to factor into which car we suggest rather than something to discover at the end.

*Pre-launch note: the driver criteria, deposits, excesses and mileage allowances quoted here are read from Performance & Prestige's own catalogue data, which is still being confirmed with the owner and the insurer. Read them as the shape of the figures rather than as a quotation. What binds is your written quote and your agreement.*