Residents in Tavistock are urging local authorities to improve the state of the town’s pavements after an increasing number of accidents.

An 80-year-old Tavistock resident, who did not wish to be named, fell to the ground outside the Edinburgh Woollen Mill shop on Brook Street last week. She sustained minor injuries (bumps and bruises) and also damaged sentimental jewellery.

She said: ‘Eighty-year-olds don’t want to fall, chance breaking anything and suffer from shock. Incidents have been happening for months and months — the pavements are getting worse and worse.’

In early September, another incident occurred where a woman in her mid-60s tripped, smacked her head and cut her nose on the pavement. Kenny Lake, owner of Oggy Oggy Pasty Shop and Megan Chamberlaine and Olivia Carr (manager and assistant manager) from Crew Clothing on Brook Street rushed to the lady’s aid, cared for her and administered first aid whilst waiting for an ambulance to arrive. Kenny said: ‘We filed a report to the authorities. We’ve spoken to Devon Highways repeatedly in trying to get uneven and loose paving slabs outside the store sorted.’

Megan and Olivia spoke of the difficulties some people have experienced with damaged, cracked and uneven paving slabs outside of their store: ‘Accidents happened last year too,’ they said. ‘Our landlord complained to the council and some slabs outside the shop were fixed along with the drain outside Oggy’s but they went untreated for years. Even now there are still cracked and uneven paving slabs which are dangerous.’

County Councillor for Tavistock Debo Sellis, who is also a borough councillor, said: ‘I’m very sorry to hear that people have injured themselves, that’s the last thing anybody wants. The Highways do try to maintain uneven surfaces and have previously stated that ultra neat tarmac would be the safest thing but this would be difficult to introduce given Tavistock’s Heritage status.’

The Devon County Council Highway budget was cut by £20-million earlier this year. Cllr Sellis has brought a motion to West Devon Borough Council to contact all Devon-based MPs to lobby for fairer funding from the Government to improve roads and walkways and urged people who have experienced a problem to report this immediately on DCC’s website at www.devon.gov.uk under ‘report a problem.’