A STRAWBERRY seller found in a layby on the A303 will be advertising his wares up and down the country after his portrait was captured on film by The Adver’s very own photographer and selected as one of 100 faces of Britain.

Thomas Dryden-Kelsey encountered Horace the strawberry seller in a layby between Amesbury and Stonehenge.

In exchange for a punnet of strawberries, Horace agreed for Thomas to take his portrait, which forms part of the photographer’s project to document the people living, working and travelling along the A303.

But now Horace has found greater fame beyond Thomas’s own exhibitions and website after he was chosen from almost 4,000 entries from photographers up and down the country to form part of the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain exhibition.

Envisaged as “an exhibition by the people, of the people and for the people”, Portrait of Britain will see the 100 chosen photographs displayed on JCDecaux’s digital network of screens in railway stations, shopping centres, high streets and bus stops around the UK.

Horace forms part of Thomas’s own collection of work capturing the characters found along the 93-mile stretch of A-road between Hampshire and Devon.

His fascination with the road, long famed for long summer traffic jams as it cascades from two lanes down to one and back to two again, began while he was at school and had to travel back and forth from just outside Andover to a small turn off past the A36 - a journey undertaken for five years between the ages of 11 and 15 .

Each of the portraits and scenes that Thomas has captured along the A303 were taken using traditional film, rather than the modern digital SLR cameras he uses day-to-day to fill The Adver’s pages with pictures.

“We are more than ever modifying our British Landscape to fit our lifestyle,” he said.

“In my mind the 303 is an ever changing quintessential English road. Bricked-up buildings, road side cafes, open fields, waitresses, KFC, Stonehenge solstices and a human encroachment that depicts all that is English and all that is traditional along this famous southern road stretching across five counties.

“20 years down the road the A303 could be a much bigger road and there won’t be strawberry sellers there any more and that will be part of our culture we have lost, which is why I think it is important to document it now.”

To view the 100 portraits visit www.gallery.portraitofbritain.uk. Thomas’s 303 project can be found at www.dryden-kelsey.com.