In Essex, a single pothole became so familiar that it was given a name: Peter. What began as a modest hole, around two feet wide and four inches deep, came to symbolise a wider struggle with the county's roads.
Peter first appeared out of the ruins of a previous repair job. It was reported to Essex County Council in September 2024 by David King, a local councillor, who says that of all the issues raised with him, highways top the list.
According to King, roads are the one thing that everybody experiences and has a view about, and the picture is not pretty. Complaints about the state of the highways, he says, come up more than almost anything else in his work as a councillor.
Peter continued to get worse over the winter, until it was patched up in February 2025. But within a few weeks the edges were already wearing away, and by the autumn a new pothole had opened to one side, and then another. A year on, it was worse than before.
For King, the expectation is simple: a repair should last at least a year. The repeated failures around Peter raised questions about how long such fixes actually hold up, and whether they represent a good use of public money.
The scale of the problem is reflected in the council's own figures. It says the number of potholes has more than doubled in the past four years, and that it fixed 1.8 million of them last year, up from 1.4 million five years ago.
There was, at least, a swift ending for Peter. Just days after questions about the pothole were put to the council, a team from Essex Highways arrived with heavy machinery and lorry loads of fresh asphalt, and filled it in less than two hours, though whether it stays gone remains to be seen.