What’s happening on the King’s Road?



I’m seriously wondering if I should move. In the last 48 hours there have been two dangerous accidents within half a mile of where I live just off the King’s Road, Chelsea.

The second was just at the bottom of our street this morning. Two cars and a motor bike were involved and one of cars caught fire – I don’t know if anyone was hurt.

The first was when I was walking down the road to meet friends. An old green Porsche hit a group of pedestrians. A poor 33-year-old woman has since died from serious head injuries, after being taken to hospital in the air ambulance. Three other people were hurt.

You can see some (very bad) pictures of the scene taken on my mobile, but you can’t see that the car managed to demolish a 250 year old wall and knock down some very solid iron railings, too. The driver is in his sixties, apparently, and there’s some speculation that he passed out before the accident.

What is almost incredible is that people manage to drive fast enough to cause accidents in an area which is always congested on Saturday afternoon and Monday morning.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

5 Comments

  1. Drayton – that is terrible. You wouldn’t expect Kings Road to have so many fatalities.

    After all, it’s not the type of road where you would expect a lot of speeding traffic is it?

    I hope the idiot in the green porsche gets locked up for dangerous driving.

  2. Ian

    I was nearly run over in the King’s Road recently. I knocked on the dark window of the 4×4 to tell the driver that we had a law in this country about letting pedestrians cross the road and received a reply that sounded like a string of Russian obscenities. I made my excuses and left meekly before they pulled a gun!

  3. Rob Watson

    Wasn’t it the King’s Road where a guy going way too fast on a motorbike hit Sir Bob Geldof’s car recently while Sir Bob was trying to do a u-turn?

    There’s a lot to be said for just setting off 5 minutes earlier and not risking your life and those of other people isn’t there?

  4. Christine Conlon

    About 5 years ago. I had to swiftly pull my foot back onto the curb when a blur in a convertible shot past me. I told my sister, whom I was visiting and lives off the King’s Road, that the driver had Prince Harry’s build and hair. She said it was probably him as he spent a lot of time in Chelsea. Oddly I feel a better about my near miss with fatality as it was the closest brush I’d ever had with (suspected) royalty.

    1. Drayton

      Bloody hell, Chrissie, that’s carrying patriotism a bit far!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *