When Ellie King lost control of her car on the A4074 in Oxfordshire her husband Ryan couldn’t drive through the backed-up traffic to the crash site. So he left his car and ran down the verge to be at her side as she was lifted into the ambulance. She had broken her nose, knocked out a tooth and torn her top lip. “Don’t look in the mirror,” he told her gently.
Ellie, 30, survived, but on September 21 last year there was nothing she could do for her husband. In fine weather at about 5.50pm, Ryan ran his motorbike into the back of a Vauxhall Astra that had stopped, indicating a right turn, on a left bend near the top of an incline. He was pronounced dead from chest injuries at 11.30pm that day.
The fact that both accidents happened within a few hundred yards of each other would be a tragic coincidence on any other road, but on this particular stretch it was all too predictable: some years earlier Ellie’s mother had been involved in a crash on the same route.
The section of the road is known locally as “the 13 bends of death” after the number of treacherous curves on 4½ miles between Reading and Oxford.
Surprisingly, this stretch of the A4074 is not included in the official and highly publicised list of Britain’s most dangerous roads compiled annually by the European Road Assessment Programme (EuroRAP) a panel of EU-funded experts. In 2004 The Sunday Times featured what was then regarded as Britain’s most dangerous road, the A59 from Skipton to Harrogate. That was based on EuroRAP’s figures, which were the best available — indeed the only available — at the time. The A4074 was overlooked by the experts because it was not rated as a main trunk road. Yet its accident rate is higher than any of the officially designated dangerous roads and it is arguably the worst in Britain.
For comparison, there were 36 fatal and serious accidents along an 18.6 mile stretch of the A59 in the three years from 2001 to 2003, according to EuroRAP’s most recent figures. That equates to 1.9 accidents per mile. Over the same period the 4½-mile stretch of the A4074 recorded 16 deaths and serious injuries — 3.5 per mile.
The road’s grim legacies are not hard to find. Near Woodcote there is a small wooden cross and a black and red flag buffeted by HGVs. They mark the spot where Ardian Lata, a 28-year-old Albanian, was hit and killed last December as he walked to work from the Checkendon equestrian centre.
Lata had come to Britain where he fell in love with Amanda, an English riding instructor. They had married in May that year. After the accident his wife flew his body home to Albania for burial. This week would have been their first anniversary.
On the internet is a website dedicated to a photographer, Robert Pilgrim, killed in July 2000 when his car was ploughed into from behind by a Range Rover. Pilgrim taught art to special needs students at nearby Henley College and was on his way to photograph a field of poppies.
He was turning right when a Range Rover sped up from behind. Imran Khan, 27, hurrying to get to his aunt’s funeral in Birmingham, overtook three cars at 80mph and ploughed into Pilgrim’s Volkswagen Polo.
And in Windsor, the family of Matthew Barnard, 20, a trainee manager at McDonald’s, are also still mourning. Their son died in September 2003 when returning from the pub with a friend, Ryan Owens. Owens — who felt so grief-stricken and ashamed that he pleaded to be jailed at the resulting court case — was driving a Ford Fiesta that collided with a 7½-ton Post Office truck. Six weeks later Barnard’s girlfriend Leeanne gave birth to his daughter Bailey.
That year was a particularly bad one for travellers on the road. In November 2003, Melanie Morain, a 26-year-old pedestrian, died after being struck by a green Rover as she walked home along the verge. Less than 48 hours later two men died when their van went off the road after a collision with a lorry and hit a tree.
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