Battlefield Road is the Shrewsbury centre and the one we use for about four learners in five. Its routes take in the Column roundabout, the Battlefield link and a long stretch of the A49 dual carriageway, so a learner who is confident at speed and shaky on tight town junctions does well there. Telford is our second centre, half an hour up the road, and its routes are heavier on multi-lane roundabouts and lighter on rural lanes. We do not book Telford simply because it has an earlier date; we book it when the route suits how you drive, and we will explain which is which before you choose.

The DVSA stopped publishing test routes in 2010, but they still exist, they are still driven a hundred times a week, and any instructor who has taught here for a decade knows them. What matters is what you do with that. Driving a route until you can do it from memory produces a learner who passes at Battlefield Road and cannot cope in Chester. So we use the routes the other way round: we find the three junctions on each that catch people out, and we teach those junctions until they are ordinary. You will drive the routes, but you will also drive fifty roads that are not on them.

Meole Brace retail park first, because it is big, well marked and forgiving. Then the Column, which is a proper multi-lane spiral and the one that appears in most learners’ nightmares. Then Emstrey, where the A5 traffic arrives faster than people expect and the lane discipline has to be right first time. Then Battlefield, Preston Boats and the two minis on Sundorne Road, which are small enough to feel easy and are exactly where examiners see the most observation faults. Eleven of them on one loop by the end, and the loop takes forty minutes.

The industrial estate at Battlefield on a Sunday morning is the best free space in Shropshire for early clutch work — wide, empty, and nobody minds. Once you are past that, the loop from Meole Brace up through Radbrook and back along the A488 has every kind of junction and almost no traffic before nine on a weekend. Avoid the town centre entirely for the first twenty hours; the one-way system and the bus lanes teach nothing you need yet and will frighten a supervisor. And avoid the Column until we have done it with you, however tempting it looks from the outside.