Crowborough residents are demanding action after the bad weather made the town’s already potholed roads even worse.
In one incident highway workers had to carry out emergency repairs after a notorious potholed road claimed another victim.
A Royal Mail delivery van came a cropper on the treacherous stretch of Walshes Road – crashing into a pothole made worse by the heavy rain – and breaking its axle.
The incident prompted fed up residents, who have been complaining about the state of the road surface for several years, to demand action from the county council.
One resident told us: “We are a group of direct neighbours and we live in the original eight houses at the bottom of Walshes Road. We have been asking for years for the local council to fix the road. It has to be one of the worst main road surfaces in East Sussex.”
The residents say they were told the road would be properly resurfaced once the new homes developments were completed. “But that development ground to a halt at the end of last summer and no building works have been going on there since.
“Drivers have to drive down the middle of the road in order to avoid the worst of the potholes, and the sound of lorries and trucks crashing down the road all hours of the day and night has become too much for us local residents.”
She said the residents had been “really patient” but now they had had enough. “Our local postal worker hit one of the potholes and broke the wheel axel on his van and had to be rescued by a colleague.”
And they are frustrated that, once again, it’s only emergency repairs, not a proper resurfacing. “They are only doing patch repairs again and not even on the section where the current deepest pothole is! It’s bonkers that they don’t just resurface that entire stretch instead of doing patches all the time.”
But Walshes Road is not the only location in the town where the bad weather and heavy rain has made already potholed roads even more dangerous. One recurring pothole, which seems to refuse to be repaired, is in Croft Road between the two roundabouts for Church Road and Mill Lane.
Three times in the space of just a couple of weeks, we have spotted an East Sussex Highways steward’s van parked up in front of the hole to prevent motorists from hitting it.
Crowborough News editor, Iain Luxford, said: “There seems to be an on-going issue with that particular piece of road. Highways come out, park up to prevent cars from hitting the hole, crews fill it in, then it all washes out – and the process simply repeats. There’s always a lot of water so maybe there’s an underlying water leak problem. It really needs a proper bit of investigation and work, not just re-filling over and over again.”
And various residents have also taken to social media to complain about potholes across the town and to demand action. One was Alexander Peter who wrote on Facebook: “I’m beyond exasperated at the appalling state of the roads in Crowborough. It’s crystal clear the local authority is not fit for purpose, they are not carrying out proper maintenance or effective repairs, and they need to be held to account.
“Today, driving through Queens Road, Gordon Road and Walshes Road, I had to navigate 20+ different potholes and avoid chunks of rock and asphalt that are just sitting on the road surface. How is this acceptable?
“We’ve all reported the issues so many times and evidently nothing is being done. I’m sick of it.” He urged others to follow his lead and write to our MP, Nus Ghani, to put pressure on East Sussex County Council.
A spokesperson for East Sussex Highways said: “We were carrying out a permanent repair on the pothole in Walshes Road on Wednesday, February 4. This follows a temporary repair which was carried out last week.”
Regarding the Croft Road location, she added: “Multiple temporary repairs were carried out to make the area safe and our drainage team attended on Wednesday, February 4 to investigate an underlying water issue. If a pothole meets our Category 1 intervention levels, meaning it’s a high risk to safety, the Highways Steward will stay on site until the workforce arrive to carry out repairs.”
It has previously said it has doubled investment in preventing and tackling potholes, and in last summer’s works programme had surfaced dressed more than 40 miles of road in the county to prolong their life and prevent potholes.
In 2024 the council said it had invested £85million in the county’s road network over three years, including an extra investment of more than £22million. But it added “to bring all our 2,000 miles of roads up to perfect condition would require more than £300 million”.