Staff at a pub at the heart of the long-running Crown Island roadworks say it won’t survive another month because the disruption is driving customers away.
Workers at the Crown Hotel were so dismayed at the lack of weekend business they videoed the empty venue, blaming the ongoing work for 16 table cancellations on Mothers’ Day.
Road widening and re-surfacing on the ring road has led to almost a year of upheaval and delays in the area.
Landlord Andrew Stirland says he can’t afford to keep the business going and will be forced to close up if things don’t improve.
He said: “We’re losing between £1,000 and £2,000 per week in takings just on the fact that people can’t get here.
“The traffic is backed up, our teatime trade has really dropped down because people are just avoiding the area.”
And he fears road closures between 7pm and 11pm over the coming weeks while work continues on the £16m scheme will further hurt trade.
Picture: The Crown is in the middle of the long-running improvements
Nottingham City Council says the work is unavoidable and the road network will be greatly improved once the improvements are complete.
Councillor Nick McDonald, portfolio holder for transport, said: “Once the works are finished the road will be much wider and it will be much easier to get through that bottleneck – and Crown Island has been a bottleneck for a long, long time.
“With the volume of cars we now have on the ring road we don’t really have a choice. If we don’t do these works now we’ll have to do them at some point in the future.”
But Mr Stirland said the work could have been better managed.
He added: “They [the city council] haven’t spoken to us, they’ve not dropped any rates and they are just not taking into consideration Mothering Sunday weekend, you’re closing roads off to a major island anyway, and this one has a pub on it.”
He added: “We’ve worked really hard in the two years that we’ve been here to make this a community pub and it’s going to be lost.”
