h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I lived just up the road on Ashdown Forest for several years in the 1980s.

Local people to a large extent were irritated by all the Pooh stuff..and hoards of middle class families descending at weekends and school holidays. Yes it doesn't surprise me that Disney paid for the latest bridge rennovation.

Plus lots of little areas on the forest twee names on signs based on the Pooh books.

It is also known as Lear's Forest and supposedly where King Lear is partly based. Also it is one of the last remanants of the great forest that stretched from the Weald of Kent to the New Forest in Hampshire.

I think you got your facts more or less right..but maybe you could something in about locals being sick of heardes middle class Brit tourists turning up with screaming kids desperate to play Pooh sticks.

Thanks for the local perspective!

It wasn't just middle-class British tourists there when I last went (as the son of a ship-builder, I wouldn't describe myself as middle-class and everyone else there at the time seemed to be from overseas, despite the rain). But children wanting to drop a stick off a bridge doesn't sound too big a burden to bear.

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