On 17 January 1967, the Daily Mail ran a news brief about the sorry state of the roads in a town in north-west England. Not the biggest story of the day, it would have been forgotten quickly if one Mail reader, a certain John Lennon, hadn’t seen it, put it in a famous song and asphalted it into the consciousness of a generation or two: I read the news today, oh boy 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire It’s a story that rumbles on, 56 years later – in fact, it’s getting louder, certainly in Blackburn. Shaun Murray is a driving instructor in the area. “I would say more like 40,000 holes now,” he says. “It’s ridiculous; they’re everywhere. I’ve been a driving instructor since 2010 and it’s been getting worse.” In March, Murray had just dropped off his last student of the day and was coming back along Cranberry Lane in Darwen, around a bend, when he hit a pothole. “There were loads of them, six or seven in a row. I couldn’t avoid them; it was like a piece of cheese.” The impact ripped the side of his tyre. He had to get a new one, which cost £85. He got in touch with the council to try to claim the money back, but they wanted descriptions, photos, measurements, written reports, screenshots, sketches, all the vehicle’s documents, service records, MOT. “I replied saying: ‘The only thing you don’t want to know is what I had for breakfast.’” Claiming on insurance would have affected his premium. In the end, he gave up and took the hit – in every way.
It’s not just road users who suffer in Blackburn. Mark Russell, a Conservative councillor, tells me about a bad patch of Preston Old Road in his ward that has been repaired so often “it looks like a patchwork quilt”. People who live next to it say it’s making their lives hell. “When traffic is passing, our house is shaking,” reads an anonymous post on the app FixMyStreet, which allows residents to inform local authorities of problems. “I don’t know if it’s from the potholes that are there or if it’s from the fixing of old potholes, but it needs to be looked at. I am reporting this as it’s waking us up at night and I am also concerned it could damage our house.” Anyone who has had a pothole for a neighbour will sympathise. Maybe it’s not fair to pick on Blackburn – it’s not (quite) the worst place in England for potholes. In March, a study of government statistics by a price-comparison site found that 76% of roads in the Blackburn with Darwen council area were in need of repair, a little better than in Bristol (78.5%). (For the smoothest ride, head to Redcar and Cleveland, where 90.5% of the roads were found to be in good condition.) A postcode lottery, then, but also a nationwide problem – and one that is getting worse. The RAC reported in June that pothole-related breakdowns are at their highest level for five years. It responded to 8,170 callouts for breakdowns due to bad road surfaces in the UK between April and June, up 40% year on year. The RAC’s head of roads policy, Nicholas Lyes, put it down to “several spells of well-below-average temperatures interspersed with some very wet conditions last winter. These conditions led to water getting into cracks, freezing and expanding, which caused road surfaces to deteriorate rapidly as vehicles drove over them.”
Potholes are caused by a combination of factors, including freeze-thaw cycles, heavy traffic, water damage, age, wear and bad construction. It’s not surprising that they thrive in Britain. The government pledged to invest £5bn in road and highway maintenance between 2020 and 2025 and each year allocates funding for pothole repairs outside London. In the spring budget, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, increased this funding to fight the “curse of potholes” by £200m a year, taking it to £700m. On top of that, local authorities get funding through various schemes for road maintenance. But it’s not enough, says Mark Morrell, waving this year’s Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (Alarm) survey from the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA). It makes for, well, alarming reading, reporting that local authorities received only about two-thirds of what they needed to stop roads from deteriorating further and that more than £14bn is needed to fix the backlog of carriageway repairs. If this is all getting a bit asphalty and budgety, hang on in there – there are penises ahead, as well as Rod Stewart. Irony, too! The AIA is based in Bristol, with the worst roads in Britain, remember? There you go. Who is Morrell, you ask? Only Mr Pothole himself, a man on a mission to get every one of them filled. It began when his daughter, who had only recently passed her test, worried that drivers were straying across the carriageway to avoid potholes on a dangerous bend near their home in Northamptonshire. He complained, nothing happened, so he started a Facebook group. Hundreds joined, a local paper got in touch, then nationals and television producers. He started National Pothole Day (15 January) and became the go-to man on the subject.
“Our roads are falling to pieces; people are sick to death,” he says. “They are paying tens of billions in fuel duty, VAT on servicing and repairs to their vehicles. Every time you damage a tyre as a result of hitting a pothole, the government gets 20% [of the cost of repair or replacement, through VAT]. They’re getting £50bn in revenue from road users and giving £1bn back to councils.” The answer, he says, is a national resurfacing programme, plus £3bn a year: “You need a proper long-term plan, like in other countries.” It’s better in France, he says: “One thing Napoleon did was put good roads in, because he wanted to get his army across the country.” In 2020, to mark his own war against potholes and to show the government he meant business, Morrell drove a tank to parliament. Pothole Britain is angry – and it has started a guerrilla war. In Lostwithiel, Cornwall, a phantom filler did their own repair job. In Harlow, Essex, Stewart – yes, Rod himself – did the same. In Bromley, a man has been making pothole art, filling the cavities with plastic arks and trucks. In Cobham, Surrey, someone has been drawing huge penises around potholes. Also in Plymouth. And in Hampshire. Nothing says you have had enough like a bit of phallic graffiti.
It would be easy – with all the willies, the art and Sir Roderick – to treat potholes lightly. But they can be devastating. For car drivers, it’s rarely worse than a puncture, perhaps wheel or suspension damage, although hitting a pothole can mean losing control. For road users with only two wheels, that can be more serious. Nadia Kerr is a Manchester-based solicitor who specialises in cycling accidents. “Cyclists are vulnerable road users with very little protection,” she says. “Hitting a pothole is more likely to cause someone to fall off, on to the road and into traffic.” It is particularly dangerous after rain, when potholes are full of water; she tells me about a recent case she dealt with in which a man “was cycling along a country lane and went through what he thought was a puddle, but turned out to be a really deep pothole. The frame of his bike snapped, he went down on to the road and broke his neck.” It could have been worse: he recovered well, doesn’t have long-term problems and was able to go back to work. Nonetheless, with Kerr’s help, he made a successful claim against the local authority. In January, Harry Colledge, a retired music teacher, was killed when his front wheel got stuck in a 23cm-deep pothole in Wyre, Lancashire, and he was thrown from his bike. His wife, Valerie, told the Daily Telegraph that central and local governments must do more to fix potholes on the country’s “woefully inadequate” roads. “Deaths, thankfully, are rare,” says Kerr, a keen cyclist. “But one is too many.” For her, it’s not just about getting compensation for the individual. “It’s about trying to highlight the problem and make change.” It’s not often that cyclists and car drivers find themselves on the same side, says Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics and an expert in regional government. He says potholes are important in politics – it was no accident that the prime minister was photographed staring into (a rather small) one in Darlington this spring. “As the government has, since 2010, squeezed local government budgets, councils themselves have protected social care – and that means everything else councils do has been squeezed even harder,” he says.
The services that have been most cut are the ones that people see outside their front door: refuse collection, graffiti removal, road maintenance, potholes. “So, although they didn’t set about making sure people understood how austerity worked, they couldn’t have done it better to achieve that.” Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Shropshire, says potholes are very high on the list of things mentioned on the doorstep. “When you knock on the door and say: ‘Hello, I’m your MP; what is you top local issue?’ it’s normally the first or second thing that comes to them.” (The difficulty of getting a GP’s appointment is the only close rival.)
She says it’s because her constituency is rural, without much public transport and with a lot of heavy agricultural vehicles. “It hits you every single day; it’s right outside your front door,” she says. “If you’re driving along B roads to get to work, you’re constantly having to swerve, because they’re huge.” Travers agrees that the visibility of potholes is what makes them so important politically. “Take another issue, like should we invest more in the armed forces, or hospital-building programmes; these are relatively abstract ideas, whereas the pothole is not only not abstract, it’s experienced every day by people in their cars and on their bicycles.” What do potholes tell us? “That you can’t have high-quality services, including basic ones, like street provision, in an environment where the tax burden isn’t sufficient to fund the public services that, broadly, people want,” says Travers. “I think they are a very physical representation of a hole in the political system – that’s as far as I can go, in terms of poetry.” Not bad, but not quite Lennon: And though the holes were rather small They had to count them all Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall They have counted them all again – “they” being the RAC. Well, not exactly counted, but used information obtained from a freedom of information request to local authorities in England, then extrapolated upwards to take into account the ones that didn’t respond – plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – to estimate that the number of potholes in the UK could be as high as 2m. So, about one for every 34 people. Or, according to Lennon’s metrics, enough to fill the Albert Hall 380 times over.