‘The Boys from the Blackstuff' in our road

We were warned ages ago that the whole of our street would be closed down for four days whilst the road surface was replaced, which was all to the good. When the day came only a couple of vehicles had to be towed away because their owners hadn’t removed them as notified on the many warning signs which had been on the street for at least a week.

When the first machines arrived to strip the road surface off, the contractors found that the subsurface was very poor and it was decided they had to change tack and only now remove the road gutters next to the kerbstones. The new tarmac would be placed directly over the old surface but to a marginally thicker depth.

I couldn’t resist taking pictures of the various machines and the well disciplined work crew as they went about their work. It was hard not to think of ‘The Boys from the Blackstuff’, the wonderful and powerful tv drama series in the very early days of Channel 4 back in the 1980s. They would have had to use far more of their own hard labour and graft compared to the very mechanised modern methodology in use today.

When the gutter scraper as I call it edged up the hill towards our house, the machine had to turn when it neared the end of the road, where we live. I liked the sense of motion and change on show in this image I took from our house's hard standing.