UNIVERSITY lecturer and environmental campaigner Dr Joe Weston has died at the age of 58.

He collapsed and died from a heart attack shortly after setting off fireworks at a party he was hosting for neighbours at his home in Forest Hill, near Oxford, on November 6.

Dr Weston had lived in Forest Hill since the age of four, attending Stanton St John Primary School and secondary school in Wheatley before joining the navy aged 15.

After working as a van driver he went on to take a degree in politics and sociology at Oxford Polytechnic.

Graduating in 1985 he progressed to Diploma and MSc studies in Urban Planning.

Dr Weston spent five years working as a planning officer at the Vale of White Horse District Council before taking up a position as a lecturer at Brookes University in 1994.

He went on to become a principal lecturer and director of postgraduate Programmes in the Department of Planning. In 2009 he received his PhD.

Dr Weston will also be remembered for his role in leading the Friends of the Earth campaign to reroute the M40 away from Otmoor.

His efforts were partly responsible for the marathon public inquiry. Although this ruled in favour of the objectors, the Department of Transport decided to proceed with its original route. Refusing to give up, Dr Weston and his fellow protesters pursued a case against the Government on behalf of a farmer in the European Court of Human Rights.

When the farmer sold up the protesters bought their own piece of land calling the meadow Alice’s Field, in reference to Oxford author Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, which is said to have been inspired by the chess-board like landscape of Otmoor.

They then sold it off as more than 3,500 plots at £2 a time, with the naturalist David Bellamy among the buyers.

Buyers were then advised to sell the plots again to delay construction of the motorway further.

In the end the Department of Transport had little choice but to reroute the M40 further to the east avoiding Otmoor.

Dr Weston was also prominent in a campaign in the 1980s to stop trains carrying nuclear material through Didcot.

He became a director of Friends of the Earth and masterminded their campaign to save tropical rainforests.

Dr Weston staged an annual fireworks party for friends and villagers for 25 years and, following his funeral on Tuesday, fireworks were set off in tribute. Dr Weston leaves wife Anna, a son Michael and daughter Alice.