After 8 months of swerving to avoid an axle-breaker pothole in the road through an English village, a local decided enough was enough.
But rather than get mad, James Coxall decided to highlight the danger and frustration the hole presented with humor.
Instead of leaving a furiously indignant message on the Castle Camp town council’s answering machine, Coxall enlisted the help of his wife and kids to build a pair of wooden legs and feet, clad in jeans and shoes, and fix it down in the hole as if someone had fallen in headfirst.
“We just thought that would be the most amusing way to sort of highlight the pothole,” Coxall told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “You’ve got to have a laugh and a joke, haven’t you?”
Located on Haverhill Road in the county of Cambridgeshire, Coxall said he measured it himself, and it spanned a yawning 3 feet in length, nearly the same in width, and plunged 3 inches down into the earth.
“The kids helped. We drilled in some wood for the legs. We found an old pair of jeans that were going to the charity shop. We put them on. We stuffed it with some rags. And then we screwed a pair of their old shoes on top,” he said.
Receiving attention from their neighbors, not least at school where the Coxall kids became prankster-celebrities, the hole also attracted the attention of the requisite maintenance crews.
Within four days of the legs’ appearance on Haverhill Road, the hole was finally filled after 8 months of neglect.
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Interestingly, the council, who didn’t mention the legs in any of their notices about the repairs, chose to leave the legs where they found them.
“They didn’t bury the art,” he said. “My wife was driving past and she jumped out of the car and she saved the art off the side of the road.”
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Unfortunately for the council, Coxall enjoyed the whole experience, and says with a variety of holes to highlight, he wonders which sculpture to erect next—maybe the Titanic sinking, he pondered.
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