Residents in a sleepy Nottinghamshire village feeling “sick” of a series of roadworks and delays have been told to brace for disruption for a further two months.
Locals in Ruddington’s Flawforth Lane, on the southern edge of Nottingham, have said the roadworks have left them feeling trapped inside their own homes and unable to receive deliveries.
But alongside their online order ordeals, the roadworks – improvements on a junction with the A60 – have wreaked travel chaos.
Before the works, residents could be in the middle of Ruddington, a little over half a mile away, in just minutes.
Drivers had been told to quintuple their journey time to get to the same point
Drivers had been told to quintuple their journey time to get to the same point – and must endure two of Nottingham‘s most notorious roundabouts to do so.
Though the delays were set to be cleared over the weekend, the works have been pushed back to mid-November – with neighbours claiming they’ve been given almost no notice of the set-back.
Gwen Eyre, 47, who lives with her husband and two sons in Flawforth Avenue, which backs onto the lane of the same name, claimed one of her boys had been “physically sick” when they were told of the delay – and that she feels “trapped in my own house”.
She said: “It’s had a big effect on me… It’s made me feel really anxious. My son has been sick and struggles to walk to school and Beavers.
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The roadworks centre around this junction with the A60
“Nottingham Knight roundabout at 8.30am fills me with anxiety – my elderly parents live in Loughborough and don’t want to drive to us because it adds so much stress to the journey!”
Eyre’s neighbour Nancy Fisk said her husband Dean had been unable to take deliveries for his plumbing firm for months.
Fisk said: “If you order anything from anywhere other than Amazon, who are determined, they say: ‘Sorry – you can’t order!’
She added that the workers were now “so entrenched, it’s like they’re part of the fixtures and fittings”.
“I’m surprised they don’t have a disco on Saturday nights,” she added, but noted they were “so polite”.
Fisk continued: “We asked if we could come to a compromise… We just want to know if we can come up with a plan B or C.”
Another resident, 71-year-old pensioner Angela Hogarth, said she was “fed up” with the delays, and felt like “we don’t exist”.
Hogarth added: “We’ve put up with it for so long… I’ve lived here for 35 years and I’ve never experienced anything like this.”
A spokesman for Benchmark Property, one of the firms involved in the works, said: “The junction itself has four arms, and traffic must be allowed to flow as freely as possible through all arms at all times – ironically, if we were allowed to close the junction off completely (and just get on with it) then it could be done in a matter of weeks but sadly and obviously that wasn’t and isn’t a possibility.
“The team are doing their best now to bring the civil [engineering] work through and, working with Nottinghamshire County Council, we hope to get the carriageway surfacing done in larger areas and to speed up the process.”