A South London resident has become so frustrated by the state of the roads in his area that he resorted to filling potholes with rubber ducks and toy diggers to attract more attention to the issue.
Tim Webb, 66, of Orpington, Bromley said for the past four months, he has been reporting potholes to FixMyStreet which is a site used to flag road defects to local authorities.
After noticing that one pothole took “110 days to get fixed” he came up with a creative way to highlight the issue in his neighbourhood.
He began creating miniature scenes around potholes in the area, using props such as rubber ducks and toy construction vehicles gathered from friends, family and charity shops.
Speaking about the local authorities repair team, Mr Webb said: “God bless them, they’re rushed off their feet and can’t cope with the amount of jobs thrown at them.
“They claim it’s because of the cold weather and then they have rain.
“I have a feeling, and some people think, it’s years of underinvestment and not properly repairing roads.”
He added: “You’ve got to draw attention to it all. And I only go to the worst potholes, so I choose the best of the worst.
“I go there and have a look for myself and work out whether I think it’s worth doing a little visual story.”
He added: “I carry some water [in my car] in case there’s a pothole that needs filling with water, and the ducks obviously don’t want to be in a dry pothole.”
The resident takes pictures of the scenes he creates to post on FixMyStreet and local Facebook groups.
Some arrangements require more explaining in their captions than others, such as Mr Webb’s latest creation which includes a model flying saucer in a pothole.
“The aliens have landed and due to their advanced navigation system, which uses craters, they mistook the craters here for the craters on their own planet,” he said.
Mr Webb says he was inspired to create his “dioramas” by an Essex resident making similar pictures with potholes near the Brightlingsea coast.
Despite claiming he is not a technical expert on road safety, Mr Webb has stressed he does not want people to put themselves in danger by placing models in potholes or posing for pictures. He said: “I wouldn’t want to encourage other people to do this because I don’t want them putting themselves at risk or causing accidents.”
The resident said he has often seen roads in the borough with up to four potholes present at a time.
He said that while the council’s teams prioritise the worst potholes, he sometimes sees teams leaving after only repairing the most severe hole in a group of several: “They might as well do all four of them, rather than do one.
“They leave the other three and they get worse. By fixing one out of the four, the danger is that it satisfies no one.”
He added: “The other thing that tends to happen now is because there’s such a backlog, quite a number of the potholes end up as a temporary fix, and that temporary fix will then fail in a few weeks or a few months.”
Conservative Councillor Nicholas Bennett, portfolio holder for transport for Bromley Council, said at a meeting on April 24 that the backlog of potholes to be repaired was scheduled to be completed by the end of May.
He said 13 teams were fixing about 70 potholes a day, and that the teams would continue to work through the summer once the backlog had been dealt with.
He said at the meeting: “We are trying our best. We are very embarrassed by it, who wouldn’t be?
“None of us wants to see our roads in this state, but this weird combination of weather we’ve had this year has simply exacerbated it across the country.
“But we will get on top of it and I would just ask for some bearance [sic].”
Mr Webb said that while he was “frustrated” by the issue, he does sympathise with the council and contractors, and recognises they are doing their best in a difficult situation.
“I am not in it to knock or bash the council or the contractors,” he said.
“I think they’re all doing their best in very trying circumstances.
“But I think what they should do is come clean with the residents of Bromley and say, ‘It could be months before the situation is under control.
“At the moment, we’ve got X number of potholes across the area, we can only clear X number a day. Sorry, folks’. But I think they are a long way off saying that at the moment.”
Bromley Council was approached for comment but had not responded at the time of publication.
