With many village roads increasingly used as a time and cost-cutting shortcut, campaigners are fighting back
Eloise Jackson was riding her green BMX bike home from a park with her mother, Laura, when the accident happened. An inquest on Tuesday, November 1, heard that the seven-year-old died after colliding with a heavy goods lorry in Collingbourne Ducis in July 2021.
Her parents and other residents are now campaigning for a total ban on heavy lorries using the A338 as it passes right through the heart of this pretty Wiltshire village, used as a shortcut to Swindon and the M4. According to ex-Metropolitan Police officer Philip Palmer, now the clerk of the neighbouring parish council, their presence is turning the place into “the wild west”.
Outlawing HGVs, the campaigners say, will be Eloise’s legacy. But Collingbourne Ducis is by no means alone as a community blighted by them.
In North Lincolnshire’s South End, residents have counted almost 350 passing each way through a one-lane stretch on a single day, sometimes 57 in an hour, many wanting a quicker route to or from the port of Immingham. James and Claire Ramsay’s young son was involved in a near miss with a lorry, yet they say local authorities appear deaf to their protests. “If they continue to do nothing, there will be a fatality,” says Claire. “With this volume of traffic, it is inevitable.”