Haggett-Smith, who has spent £300 ($638) on plants and soil since starting his campaign in July, said he had a near “100% success rate” at forcing the council to make repairs.
“They get filled in by the council quite quickly as well, which is really the most important thing in all of this: the council getting off their arse and actually doing something about it, which, at first, I thought was a coincidence,” he said.
“But, almost all the potholes I’ve filled have now been tarmacked by the council. I’ve almost got a 100% success rate. A few of them haven’t yet, but it can’t be a coincidence.”
Haggett-Smith decided to start his campaign because of his anger with the state of local roads.
“I was just sick of the road standards where I live and I wanted to do something about it that wasn’t illegal and wouldn’t cause any criminal damage,” he said.
“There was one pothole that I was really bothered about and then I thought, ‘oh, I might do another one’, and then after a few videos all the attention came.”
Millions of views
Haggett-Smith’s TikTok account documenting his campaign has earned over 200,000 likes and millions of views.
But he is not upset that most of his floral installations are destroyed by passing traffic soon after they are planted.
“I don’t try and make the flowers look like they’re going to last because I know full well that after 10 minutes of filming a video, someone’s running that over,” he said.
Pothole-related road incidents are a growing problem in the UK. The Royal Automobile Club attended more than 30,000 breakdowns due to potholes last year, up by a third from the previous year.
Mark Morrell, a veteran anti-pothole campaigner who styles himself as Mr Pothole, estimates using data from a new AI dashboard app that Britain’s roads are riddled with 11.5 million potholes, five times higher than previous estimates.
‘We understand frustrations’
A West Sussex County Council spokesman said it had increased its pothole budget by £4 million this financial year and that more than 26,000 potholes had been fixed since spring.
“We understand people’s frustrations with potholes, but we ask that members of the public do not undertake work or do anything to the pothole as they risk their lives — and potentially, other people’s lives if they cause an accident — by going on a live carriageway,” the spokesman said.
“We encourage people to report potholes to us online, so that we can send an inspector to visit the site and organise the repair as quickly as possible. Every pothole report we receive will be inspected and if it meets our criteria for repair, we will get to it and we will fix it.”
