Headley Park is not quite an island - the locals joke that there’s two roads in and one road out - but it has an island feel.
On a hill in South Bristol, the quiet residential estate is perched above steep-sided, wooded valleys on both sides - Manor Woods Valley on one and Crox Bottom on the other, with the Caters industrial estate effectively forming another barrier to the south.
The two roads in to what is almost a huge cul-de-sac come from Bishopsworth, while the one road out leads to the rest of the city - down St Peter’s Rise to Hartcliffe Way and Bedminster. So when council surveyors found that the main artery through Headley Park was subsiding and needed to be fixed, the local residents knew there would be a bit of disruption.
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The area was built pretty much in one go in the mid-1930s with roads off St Peter’s Rise expanding South Bristol, connecting up Bedminster with what had been the village of Bishopsworth.
The remaining fields in the spaces left before Hengrove Way were filled in during the 1970s and 80s, and now Headley Park is a series of cul-de-sacs off two roads.
The council closed the main one - St Peter’s Rise - in January as contractors ETM arrived to commence work. Residents were told it was a big job - they had to dig down one metre to remove the old concrete blocks the road was made of, and replace that with foundations that wouldn’t start slipping down the slope as the concrete had done, and then top it all off with nice tarmac. The work would take six months, residents were told, and the nightmare would be over by May.
“It’s now August,” said Dave John, the local butcher. “And they’ve just changed the completion date on the roadworks website again, from August 9 to August 12.”
Dave, whose self-named butchers shop has been a stalwart retail offering for years at the Bishopsworth end of St Peter’s Rise, felt the impact of the road being closed when it first happened. The contractors started at the north end, and gradually moved towards him. As soon as the road was closed, the only bus service serving Headley Park, the 76, was diverted away to run through Bedminster Down instead.
Last month, the road outside his butchers and the little run of shops where Headley Park meets Bishopsworth, was fenced off, the side roads inaccessible, people faced with huge round trips just to walk from one side of the street to the other.
On the approach to the Headley Park Church and Headley Park community centre, opposite the shops, a woman is walking along the pavement, when she glances left and lets out a gasp of surprise. “Oh, you can get up that road, now?” she asks, pointing across the St Peter’s Rise to the entrance to Headley Park Road. “It’s been shut for weeks, I’ve been having to walk all the way round!” she exclaimed.
As the Herras fencing and the resurfacing lorries have slowly and imperceptibly worked south west along St Peter’s Rise, various side roads have been closed and access denied, before reopening again. People living in the side roads have got used to taking new routes to get out of the maze of residential streets on the estate, never quite knowing whether they’d be confronted with a fence or not.
May came and went, and turned to June then July. “We should be into the final stretch now,” said Dave. “They have been speeding up, but I’m not sure if they will be finished by August 12. If I was someone at the council, I’d make sure they have someone whose job it is to make sure the contractors they hire are going as fast as they can, all the time,” he said.
On the Thursday afternoon Bristol Live visited, the 260m stretch at the end of St Peter’s Rise was closed off by the fencing. Inside, the workforce number barely a handful - two workmen were hard at it cutting the new surface which covers half the road, while a couple of others were also there.
“I don’t have high hopes to be honest,” said Nabeela Shafique, who everyone calls Ruby. She runs the Premier store opposite the church with her husband, and has watched the fence arrive from her vantage point behind the counter.
“It was supposed to finish in May. Our customers, they can’t really reach us. The main thing has been the bus, but it’s people who walk too. We used to get lots of people coming in, but not so much now.
“We are struggling with our deliveries now too, it’s harder to access the shop,” she added.
Dave agreed. “A lot of people pop in on the way to work or way home from work, and now there’s no parking and the road is closed, they don’t. Or if they do, people have just been parking where they can, all over the pavements, everywhere,” he said.
“Trade is pretty much sh** now, the whole of South Bristol has become horrendous, what with the Malago Road being closed too. Last Wednesday, for example, I only took £62 in the whole day,” he added.
Dave John said he put a post on his butcher’s shop Facebook page pointing out the ring of Herras fencing that now fills the road, and the impact on his business. “It went a bit viral,” he said. “So many people commented, it has so far been seen by more than 11,000 people,” he added.
He also complained to Bristol City Council and did receive a response last week. The council explained in detail what had caused the delays, and it is complicated.
"The delays have come about due to the identification of multiple gas services that cross the carriageway in each section that is dug," the council's transport engagement team told the butcher. "The gas services could not be located because they have been 'moled' through.
"This is a technical term in the industry. As a brief explanation, it is a method used to lay pipes and ducting, which does not need a trench to be built for the pipes to be laid.
"This meant that the contractors had to hand dig around locations they anticipated gas services will be, therefore taking longer than planned to complete. The delays have been exacerbated by absences due to Covid and the national shortage of HGV drivers, which means there is not the same turn-around time to remove excavated material and bring back-fill material in," they added.
The council apologised for the delays, which have turned a six-month job into a nine-month-and-counting one. "We apologise for this, and the inconvenience this is causing you and your neighbours
"The project team is doing everything in their power to bring this project to completion as soon as possible, including keeping an eye on the contractor on site to ensure that they are working to the updated schedule," they added.
After inquiring about the length of time the road has been closed for, Bristol City Council issued a statement late on Friday. It apologised for the disruption, gave new information that the road would be closed for the rest of August, and said that the project was always intended to take 'between six and nine months'.
“St Peters Rise, adjacent to Headley Park has needed essential maintenance for some time," a spokesperson said. "We invested £1.7 million capital funding to completely reconstruct the road, after complaints of potholes, road bouncing and previous efforts to stabilise the road through grouting and other methods.
“The planned works, which started in January, were due to take between six to nine months to complete. We have experienced some delays, due to the COVID-19 pandemic earlier in the year and utility services hindering excavations. Reconstruction work on St Peter’s Rise is due to finish at the end of August. Further surfacing work will be required on Church Road from St Peter’s Rise to the mini roundabout on Whitchurch Lane, which will take one week.
“We apologise for the inconvenience that the road closure and disruption has caused to local residents and businesses, while vital maintenance work has been taking place," she added.
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