4,000 Holes In Blackburn, One Or Two In Wenvoe
4,000 Holes In Blackburn, Lancashire And One Or Two In Wenvoe
In the Daily Mail on 17 January 1967, the Beatles famously found their inspiration for the Sgt. Pepper track ‘A Day in the Life.’ John Lennon’s lyrics repeated an article’s claim that there were ‘4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.’ It went on to speculate that if Blackburn was typical there would be over 2 million potholes in Britain’s roads. One suspects today the total would be much higher.
It is estimated that, on average, there are about six potholes per mile in council-controlled roads in England and Wales. The RAC ‘Pothole Index’ suggests that motorists are now twice as likely to break down as a result of wear caused by potholes than they were 17 years ago.
No one actually seems to know where the term pot- holes comes from. One source attributes it to time when potters dug holes in Roman roads to steal the clay they were made with. Today we can firmly blame bad weather and heavy traffic for so many potholes. It is of course, the same the world over. And pot holes are dangerous. ‘India Today’ reported in 2018 that over 9,300 people had been killed and nearly 25,000 were injured in road accidents caused by potholes; a greater a danger they said, than terror attacks.
Meanwhile, back in Preston, Lancashire (and just down the road from Blackburn) an inquest found a pothole to have been the major cause of the death of a cyclist in January 2023. Interestingly, last year, The South Wales Argus reported the results of a Freedom of Information Request which revealed that the Welsh Government had paid out a massive £1,188,565.25 to an anonymous claimant for a ‘pothole-caused personal injury’ which took place four years earlier.
Citizens have become increasingly innovative in drawing attention to the problem. Recently on the streets around Bury and Ramsbottom, near Manchester, one man employed crudely drawn male genitalia in a bid to attract the local council’s attention to pot-holes. Within 48 hours, many had been filled. Back in India, fed up with the authorities failure to repair a pothole in the middle of a main road in north Banga-lore, artist Baadal Nanjundaswamy created an extremely lifelike sculpture of a huge crocodile and painted the area around it green to make it look like a pond. The locals were startled and the pot hole soon fixed!
So what about the Vale of Glamorgan? In March 2021, the Welsh Government announced £12 million extra funding to help improve the condition of our roads. You can report potholes to the Vale by completing a simple online form. To qualify for repair the pothole must extend in any direction by just over the size of a sheet of A4 paper. If they fit the criteria, the Vale target is, if possible, to fix all reported potholes within 28 working days. Potholes that are identified in a high risk area are repaired within 24 hours. Finally though, the Vale have a word of warning for us……’please don’t measure potholes, it is dangerous.’