Fancy having road chippings with your Weetabix? Eating the popular cereal from a pothole is the latest stunt by local campaigner Ben Thornbury designed to highlight the problem of potholes on the roads in and around his home town of Malmesbury, Wiltshire.
Two years ago, when he created a crazy golf course from potholes on the town’s high street and invited locals to play, three weeks later the council resurfaced the entire road. Coincidence or not, buoyed by that success Thornbury followed it up with more pothole golf, this time on St Mary’s Street, elsewhere in the town. Last year, he moved onto pothole fishing on a road close to Malmesbury’s famous abbey.
A short while later, the council patched up the potholes – but by early 2025 they had reappeared, so the council resurfaced it. In July, Thornbury came up with the idea of eating Weetabix from a pothole, a stunt he performed in Somerford Keynes, a nearby village. Most recently, in August, he painted some of Malmesbury’s potholes with St George’s Crosses.
Reflecting on his stunts, Thornbury says: “I won’t do the Weetabix one again – milk and gravel isn’t very nice – and the council has warned that painting potholes is vandalism and won’t help bring repairs forward. But pothole golf was great fun and I think made a difference. People queued to have a go and drivers tooted their car horns in support. A local councillor told me he believed the stunts encouraged Wiltshire Council to resurface the roads.”
The council denies this. Leader Ian Thorn told Autocar: “We have invested significant extra funds into repairing and maintaining Wiltshire’s roads over the past two years. This is making a real difference in all parts of the county, including Malmesbury.
“This work has been planned for several years and is not the result of any campaign. This hard work is paying off, as in the first six months of this year there has been a 44% fall in the number of potholes reported to us compared with the same period in 2024. We will continue to work hard to improve Wiltshire’s roads.”
Still, Thornbury’s efforts at least resonated with other council offices, as well as with aggrieved motorists nationwide. For example, Joe Harris, cabinet member for highways at Gloucestershire County Council, has invited him to Cirencester to see how the council repairs potholes.
Meanwhile, towns and villages across the UK have asked him to publicise their potholes. It’s quite an achievement for a young chap who is only just learning to drive.