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Road crash victims to get permanent memorial
8:00am Wednesday 13th May 2009

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A PERMANENT memorial for road crash victims is being planned for Bolton.

Council chiefs are launching a consultation exercise on a proposed roadside tributes policy.


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Is the proposed permanent memorial a good idea?

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As part of plans being considered, memorials placed at the scene of accidents, such as flowers and photographs, would be removed after 30 days.

In their place, a monument or tree at a central location in the borough would become the centrepiece of a permanent memorial site.

Queens Park, Heaton Crematorium, Heaton Cemetery and the grounds of Bolton Parish Church in Churchgate are being considered as potential sites for the memorial.

Cllr Nick Peel, the council’s executive member for environmental services, said: “The sight of floral tributes and other mementoes at the roadside has become far more common over recent years.

“To some people they are a way of recognising and remembering that a tragedy occurred, but to others they are a distraction or an unwanted reminder that someone died in their neighbourhood.”

The new policy could also include imposing similar time limits on repeat memorials at anniversaries and the council keeping non-perishable items for 90 days, giving families the chance to retrieve photographs and cuddly toys often left at the scenes of crashes.

The consultation is set to start this week via the council’s Scene newspaper and its website.

All opinions voiced will help shape the policy, which will then go before the council’s Executive for approval.

The council then plans to produce a leaflet which will be given out to the relatives of road crash victims setting out its process. As plans are in the early stages, the finer details, such as who would enforce any new rules are yet to be decided.

Peter Molyneux, the council’s assistant director of highways and engineers, said: “The 30 days will be a notice period during which we hope the families would be minded to remove the tributes themselves without the council having to do so.

“We want to set out from the start what is going to happen and then we will deal with it in a very sensitive way.”

Although the consultation process is yet to start, campaigners from the Manchester branch of Road Peace, the charity which helps relatives of road crash victims, have given their backing to a idea of a permanent memorial.

Sandra Dutson said: “It is a very emotive issue. It sounds like Bolton Council is trying to approach it in a very sensitive way and any kind of permanent memorial is always welcome.”

Cllr Peel added: “We will treat each case separately but we need to have a broad policy in place. We know it is a case of balancing the needs of the relatives of victims and those of local residents.”

The survey will be available in the council’s Scene newspaper, online at http://www.bolton.gov.uk/roadsidetributes and from the consultation and research team on 01204 332012.

The deadline for completing surveys is June 15.

Oh that's a given, but will it get to the stage where people want memorials for everything? People dying in a fire, people fell of their bike, etc.

Talking in a very insensitive way, I wouldn't want to pay for a memorial, or the upkeep.

Personally I can't see the point of leaving flowers at the roadside when someone dies there, to me it would be the same as leaving flowers at hospital bedsides, on pavements ,in shops and anywhere where someone might die of a heart attack or old age.

Personally I can't see the point of leaving flowers at the roadside when someone dies there, to me it would be the same as leaving flowers at hospital bedsides, on pavements ,in shops and anywhere where someone might die of a heart attack or old age.

Opinion: Andrew Grimes
May 15, 2009

SOME months ago it became impossible to go into a highly popular and impeccably respectable pub through the front door because the paving was blocked with flowers and cards in tribute to a young man who had been murdered inside.

Nobody tried to move them and they stayed there for well over six weeks.

I think, on reflection, this, though unsettling, was a genuine expression of widespread sorrow over an awful, one-off tragedy which it would have been callous to curtail.

But moving towards that pub from whatever direction it was necessary to pass many other floral commemorations quite unconnected.

Far more people are killed in road crashes than are murdered. It's a tragic manifestation of 21st century recklessness. But is it pardonable to commemorate every accidental one of them for months with a huge floral pile at every fatal spot?

More to the point, is it safe? I suppose it could be argued that a floral memento mori strewn by the roadside might remind motorists of their own mortality and encourage them to drive more carefully.

Cenotaphs

But does it? A taxi-driver rattling me across town the other night told me he was sick of seeing so many junction verges turned into home-made cenotaphs.

"They don't really put me off," he said, after we had passed the second array of wreaths, cards and teddy bears. "But I'm a professional driver and I don't have a dicky heart. Sooner or later, one of these things is going to put some poor swerving sod in the same place as the departed."

One can understand why the grieving family of a crash victim may want to mark the spot where their relation came to a premature end. I do not criticise them. But this show of mourning does not stop with them.

For certain sorts of people, the news of a fatal accident draws them to its site like vultures to carrion. They decline to be left out of the obsequies, piling more vegetation and toys on the tributes laid by the genuinely bereaved.

It has become a trend. I guess it was started, 13 years ago, by the mass decoration of The Mall with flowers and toys and balloons by huge crowds wailing hysterically over Princess Diana.

An elderly woman, you may remember, was actually arrested for 'stealing' one of the rain-sodden teddy bears.

Accidental

She probably wanted a permanent relic on her mantelpiece. From thereon, every accidental death became a magnet for weirdos who, in past times, would have earned their livings as professional wailers.

Alert to the potentially hazardous nuisance of magnetic roadside shrines are nearly all the councils of Greater Manchester, though nervously so. Some, to be sure, are thinking of implementing a strict 30 day limit on them.

But Bolton's wants to consult public opinion before making up its mind. That almost certainly guarantees that the town's huge army of funeral gate-crashers will threaten to burn down the town hall if they are denied the democratic right to join in the grief of strangers.

Manchester is offering a crash-site plaque to families whose flowers they have removed. Oldham is keeping out of it. "The flowers," it says, "will stay until they have perished" - unless they obstruct the highway.

Elsewhere, some towns are setting aside plots for plaques in parks and cemeteries. Would these be less vandal-proof than memorials to dead soldiers? And is it, anyway, a good idea to treat crash deaths as unavoidable and valiant as deaths in war? Surely, it would better to abolish junction blind spots and to impose life-long driving bans on maniacs.

No man is an island, and all that. The instinct to weep for the grief of others is innate. But so, in some, is the impulse to become characters in a wail-fest as scripted for a dark episode in Coronation Street.