Local Elections: At the grass roots: Villagers wax lyrical over 'curse of the car': Transport is a key issue for voters in the day-tripper traps of Wordsworth country. Sandra Barwick reports

DAFFODILS sway in the sun. The villagers of Ambleside, in Cumbria, know spring has truly arrived in Wordsworth's lakes by the heady, seasonal scent of burnt brake linings in the narrow road that leads to Kirkstone Pass.

With the warmth comes that curse on the Lake District: the day tripper's car. A booted young man lugged his haversack through the village's main street, past the shuttered Ambleside bus station. 'Have you seen t' speed cars go here?' he said. 'It's worse than t' city.'

Mr Wordsworth could well have exercised his pen on the subject of the barren bus station of Ambleside. Its importance is more than just symbolic, it is very real to the residents of the village. The station's closure and its proposed replacement with yet more tourist shops is the most important issue of the local elections.

'It's wrong that there's nothing for Ambleside people. They're pushing us out all the time,' Mary Jackson said at the door of her white-painted council house on the village's edge.

Mrs Jackson was born in Outgate, just across Lake Windermere. She and her husband, both pensioners, have no car. 'The kiddies go down for the bus on a wet morning, they're soaking wet before they get to school,' she said. 'The express stops down at Low Fold. There's no way you can carry heavy cases all that way. It costs pounds 3.75 to go to Kendal to shop once a month.

'Give us our bus station back and a nice little garden with seats. When people go shopping they want to have a natter.'

Mrs Jackson is, as a result of the bus station, voting Liberal Democrat. David Vatcher, her candidate, who owns a local bed and breakfast, shook her hand. 'Are you in good health?' he said. 'Well, you have to be, haven't you?' Mrs Jackson replied.

It is a straight fight in Ambleside between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. Mr Vatcher and the Conservative candidate, Paul Collins, are at one in resisting a shopping development on the bus station site. But Mr Vatcher points out that it is the Tory policy of denationalising the buses which is responsible for the fact that the station has been asset-stripped and put up for development.

'To some extent,' Mr Vatcher said, 'I have been a lone voice in the wilderness on the bus station.' On 18 August last year, he stood at the roadside and helped to count 12,600 vehicles passing through this village of 3,000 people between 8am and 6pm. Local buses do not run much in the evenings, so teenagers and people without cars feel trapped. But the good news is that bus services are improving. In summer, buses come into the village 116 times a day. The bad news is that there is no central point for them to go.

The council has no money to buy the site and develop it back into a station. In an ideal world, Mr Vatcher said, he would like to see it turned back into a bus station, complete with taxi rank, shelter and cafe, and sending the message to Ambleside's visitors that public transport's place is right at the village's heart.

What locals do not want are yet more shops selling slate ash-trays, handmade chocolates and jumpers decorated with sheep.

Geoffrey Thornborough works at the ironmonger's shop opposite the bus site, known to locals as 'Tinny Martin's' because its founder was a tinsmith. He too has no car. 'Ambleside won't stand a lot more shops,' he said. 'It will only drag in more traffic.'

Mr Thornborough grew up in Ambleside and regrets the decline of the old approach to local government. 'In local elections it always used to be you voted for the person you knew best and thought would do best. But now,' he said regretfully, 'political parties have crept into it.'

In past centuries, the hard life on the fells led to a tradition of independent spirit for which the 'statesmen' or yeoman farmers were renowned.

That tradition continues. The South Lakes District Council has never had an overall majority. At present it has 17 Conservatives, 6 Labour, 15 Liberal Democrats and no fewer than 14 independents, none of whom wholly agree with one another. Yet the council has not declined into chaos. Its independent members say that the mix improves the quality of debate and forces people to listen to the best argument.

'I think at this level it works well. The issues are related to local people, and party politics have nothing really to do with them,' Brian Todd, an independent councillor in Kendal for 31 years, said.

Mr Todd, the son of a local grocer in Kendal, who now runs a bacon wholesale business, is up for re-election in Stone Croft ward. He refuses to take any of the allowances due to him for local government service. 'I think people find it refreshing to meet someone who will serve them whatever their politics are,' he says.

Of the 2,000 voters in his ward, Mr Todd says he knows at least 600 personally. Here too in the suburbs, the environment is the main issue: traffic, bus passes, the cleanliness of local parks, and the local sewage works.

'Sewerage was a tremendous problem here for years,' Mr Todd said. 'There was a terrible smell over half Kendal. Now there's tankers carrying sewage out every day.'

Some of his opponents complain about the tankers, but Mr Todd is adamant that they are wrong. 'I know the score in sewage,' he said.

Whether the general dissatisfaction with Mr Major will result in more votes for him or for his Labour and Liberal Democrat opponents, he does not know. But he is working extra hard on the doorstep, just in case.

He knocked on the door of a smart semi-detatched house. 'I'm worried about this plan to have two-way traffic down the main street,' a young woman said. 'Oh that's been dropped,' Mr Todd replied, 'it would never have worked.' The problem of traffic in the lakes, he says, has been an issue for all his 31 years as a councillor, but a solution is no closer.

Back in Ambleside, Geoffrey Thornborough leaned on his door and looked at the view of the fells. 'It upsets the very thing that people come here for,' he said. 'They want to get away from it all, not get stuck in a traffic jam.'

(Photograph omitted)