John Smith
27 January, 2025
News

Eastwood man demands action from county council after car smashes into his garage

An Eastwood man has demanded Nottinghamshire Council takes action after a speeding car ploughed off the road and into his garage, causing serious damage.

A speeding car smashed into Andrew Brown's garage.

Andrew Brown, aged 53, lives on Main Street in Eastwood next to the bend in the road where it becomes Chewton Street.

The entrance to his garage is on the bend and this month, a car once again crashed into it after going too fast to make the bend.

Not withstanding the misery this is causing him with the damage to his garage, Andrew says the woman who lives next door to him is scared that one day a car will smash through the wall of her home.

Andrew says it's the third time and incident like this has happened and wants the county council to take action.
Andrew says it's the third time and incident like this has happened and wants the county council to take action. Credit: Submitted

And he adds that if something is not done about the problem, someone is going to get killed.

Yet he claims his appeals to the council and Via – which looks after highways for the authority – for traffic calming measures to be put in place have contiually fallen on deaf ears.

He said: “The first major incident was in 1999 when the garage had to be totally rebuilt, the next one was in 2020 when someone crashed into the garage and knocked my car out the back of it, writing my car off.

"And this latest incident was caused by the driver speeding – we know that from CCTV footage – and they couldn’t take the bend and went down our drive and smashed into my garage."

After the second incident in 2020, said he contacted the county council, who put him in touch with Via and he asked about traffic calming and was told there was no need for it because there was a chevron on the bend and road markings in place – but Andrew pointed out that there were, in fact, no road markings and the chevron had been defaced.

He continued: “They did eventually repaint the road and put the chevron back on and if circumstances changed, I should call them back.

"I did that after this latest incident and they started getting all technical on me and said there was no data to support having traffic calming on that road.

"So they instead said they would paint a white line on the outside of the road and put in an interactive speed indicator sign, but none of this can happen until the new tax year.

"I and my neighbours just want some traffic calming measures put in place on the road – I would love to think they’d put speed humps in as there’s new housing being built on Chewton Street.

"My neighbour lives in fear daily that someone is going to come through the wall of her house and she won’t let her children sit near one wall in her living room because of this.”

Lucy Atkinson, Andrew’s neighbour, told the BBC: “It just leaves you in fear all the time because you just think it’s going to be that one time that someone’s come through my house and I just want them to be safe.”

A highways manager from Nottinghamshire Council said: “We are always concerned to hear about any collisions occurring on Nottinghamshire’s roads.

“We understand residents’ concerns about reported incidents on Main Street in Eastwood and are currently in the process of finding an appropriate location to install a temporary interactive sign to remind drivers of the speed limit and warn drivers of potential hazards.

“We are also considering additional road markings to further highlight the bend to road users.

“We carefully consider where more significant measures, such as traffic calming are needed within the county, and these are targeted to sites where there is the greatest evidence of an ongoing safety issue and where they can have the biggest impact on safety.”