“It’s like a duckpond.”
For more than three years, Michael Taylor has been calling on Nottinghamshire County Council to repair a pothole outside his home in Carlton.
But they’ve not done it, citing the reason the hole on Glendale Close “does not meet the criteria for remedial work”.
Mr Taylor begs to differ.
“I’ve been drenched three times getting in the car when cars drive past through it after it’s rained,” says the 72-year-old retired mechanic. “Once I was sitting in the car with the window open and I got drenched.
“And another time my daughter parked it and left the window open overnight. The upholstery was wet through the next day.”
The two-metre long, beer-bottle shaped crater was but a small inconvenience when Mr Taylor first reported it in early 2022. Not long after, highways workers came to repair it, filling the hollow with tarmac.
But as the sun dawned the next day, Mr Taylor noticed a fist-sized cavity remaining next to the newly filled hole in the road.
“I phoned them to ask if that was actually the repair,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it. They told me they only do what’s necessary.
“I said: ‘It is necessary’. I said: ‘Mark my words – in a few weeks or months time it’s going to get bigger. Cars will go over it and break the side’. And that’s exactly what’s happened.”
Over the following three years, the road surface around the tennis-ball sized cavity began to wear away.
Mr Taylor said he kept repeatedly ringing the council, and staff have been out seven or eight times, he claims, to the patch.
But it’s only ever to measure it – not repair it, he claims.
When they arrive, with a long ruler, according to Mr Taylor, they find, repeatedly, that the pothole is less than 30mm deep – allegedly the threshold for repairs.
But they only measure around the edge, he says, not the middle, where it’s at least 50mm down, he claims.
A neighbour of Mr Taylor’s, Patrick Flewitt, says he has made his own complaints after he tripped in the hole on the way back home from a local pub.
“I was coming back from Wetherspoons,” said the 82-year-old. “I got off the bus, it was dark, and I crossed the road. I went over on it and it was aching for a few days.
“It’s been going on for years. They’re not making a proper job of it. We’re not getting value for money on our council tax.”
In the past, Mr Taylor has been out with buckets to collect the stone chippings that have come off the surface.
“Bits break off daily,” he said. “There are chips of tarmac all over the road. I got rid of my car because it kept getting stone chips on it.
“They shoot up that far that I found them on my windscreen. They started scraping when I turned the wipers on.
“I shouldn’t have to put up with it. It’s faulty workmanship. They haven’t done their job correctly.
“If I’d have paid someone directly to do it and I came back and saw what they’d done, I wouldn’t have been happy. I’d want my money back.
“Someone said we should paint a red cross on it and then they’d come and do something.”
Nottinghamshire County Council was contacted for comment.
He isn’t alone. My road is like the surface of the moon especially at the junction with Burton road. It is reported regularly. What makes it worse is that vehicles park either side, also obstructing pavements when they call at the fish and chip shop on one corner or the residential home on the other, not counting the odd van or car belonging to non-residents who park just beyond the yellow lines, so it is impossible to avoid potholes which daily become more like tank traps.