THEN AND NOW ... Ditchling Crossroads
Whether transport by foot, horse or motor car the topic of ‘traffic’ seems to have been an enduring preoccupation for Ditchling residents.
An article by Tom Dufty first published in the Ditchling Parish Council Magazine, August 2019
THEN ...
Click on this text to start editing, and enter your own text with some basic formatting. To create a link to another page or website within this section, select the text you want to make into a link and click on the Link icon on the formatting toolbar. Click anywhere outside the text box when you're done to continue working on the rest of your page.
A story passed down in Ditchling’s folklore is of an old lady at the turn of the 18th/19th centuries who, when preparing for her first journey to London, was asked what sort of place she expected to find. She replied: “Well, I can’t exactly tell, but I suppose it must be something like the busy end of Ditchling Street.”
Writing in ‘Ditchling in our own Times’ published in 1937, Bridget Johnston said: “Apart from a few new shops higher up the hill, the High Street must be very much the same as it has been for the last few hundred years. What difference there is lies less in the street itself than in the greatly increased traffic, which now requires the services of a policeman at the cross-roads. It is, by modern standards, a dangerous cross roads and of late
years there have been a number of accidents”!
NOW ...
Click on this text to start editing, and enter your own text with some basic formatting. To create a link to another page or website within this section, select the text you want to make into a link and click on the Link icon on the formatting toolbar. Click anywhere outside the text box when you're done to continue working on the rest of your page.
Today there is no policeman controlling traffic at that ‘dangerous crossroads’. Instead we have ‘the services’ of a mini-roundabout to regulate the traffic! And what about the increase in traffic since 1937? A census conducted over a twelve-hour (07.00hrs – 19.00hrs) period in 2012 produced the following convergent vehicle flows on the approaches into the crossroads.
B2112 North to South = 3169
B2116 West to East = 1510
B2112 South to North = 3591
B 2116 East to West = 2026
I think we can safely say that the traffic has increased since then. What would Bridget Johnston be saying now? Perhaps the only message we can take out of this is that everything we experience in life is relative.