The village on the outskirts of Coventry where locals live with ‘constant noise’ from the M6

The village of Corley Ash looks like any other in the county. Narrow lanes, ancient houses, small businesses plying their trade amongst the locals. However, it's the villages neighbour that makes village life here somewhat different.

The village sits right next to the M6 [1] and travellers may recognise the name by the service station on the motorway that sits adjacent to the village. Stepping out of the car, the constant hum of the motorway is all enveloping and speaking to local people required raising one's voice to be heard above the roar of traffic. The houses nearby are genteel and well kept.

Tidy lawns, trimmed hedges, and restored ancient houses line the main road as in any other village.

One resident who was out walking her dog, Anne, said that the noise was something the residents had come to live with. "It's just a constant noise all the time and it gets even worse when it rains and the road is wet." Anne said that the nearby residents hear much of what happens on the motorway, including the sirens of emergency services tending to incidents. "What we did notice was that during Covid [3], the noise suddenly stopped when people weren't able to travel.

Now it's back to normal."

The houses of Corley Ash with the M6 motorway in the background.

The motorway they live beside is one of the busiest in Britain. The road not only handles traffic travelling within the West Midlands, but also traffic between London and the North West, as well as traffic travelling the A14 to East Anglia. It even serves travellers heading to North Wales, Scotland or even further, if they're catching the ferry from Liverpool or Holyhead to Ireland.

A few Irish number plates were inevitably spotted around the roads of Corley and the surrounding villages of visitors from "across the water", as the saying goes in Ireland. The residents of Corley Ash have been living with this noise since their section of the M6 was completed in 1971. Before then, traffic for Birmingham would use the M45 and A45 around the south of Coventry [4].

Today, it's one of many villages that lives with the noise of being next to a major thoroughfare. The village is fortunate not to have any precarity over its future, compared to villages such as Sipson in West London, which was threatened with demolition in order to build Heathrow's third runway. Nonetheless, Corley Ash is a different way of experiencing village life.

With a small yet thriving community fading the noise of the M6 into the background.

References

^ the M6 (www.coventrytelegraph.net)
^