‘I honestly feel so tearful’: Lambeth residents unable to sleep due to noisy manhole cover

By Adrian Zorzut, Local Democracy Reporter

Residents claim they haven’t slept properly “in two years” thanks to a faulty manhole cover near their homes.

Renters in Harleyford Road in Lambeth claim the noise has got so bad they have developed anxiety.

Sehr Mahmud, a teaching assistant, has been living in a basement council flat in the busy road for seven years and says she’s at her wit’s end.

She claims to have complained about the issue for four years and said the last two have been “unbearable”.

She said: “When TfL took over, all they did was tarmac over it after a very long time and now it makes such a lot of noise.

“Every time any vehicle goes over it – and this is a red route so we’ve got buses and cars going over it all the time, constantly – it makes such a loud noise.

“My bedroom’s in the basement so I hear it all night long and it keeps me awake. I just can’t sleep.”

Emails from TfL to the resident show the transport authority replaced the manhole cover twice and tarmacked over it several times – all to no avail.

She said: “The lady upstairs says it’s so frustrating that she cries, and that’s me sometimes. I honestly feel so tearful sometimes because nothing seems to be being done… I can’t sleep and I’m a key worker.

“I work in a school. I need to wake up early. There are nights when I can’t sleep and I need to go into another room and I have to use ear plugs, but they don’t work because it’s so loud.

“When they put that tarmac on, it’s such a relief because I know I won’t hear anything for a little while but once that tarmac wears away, they just don’t replace it. I just don’t know why they’re not taking it seriously. It’s unbelievable. It’s like a joke. It’s been so long and no one’s been able to do anything about it.”

Sehr said she has even had to send her 12-year-old granddaughter, who stays with her, away and hasn’t seen her since Christmas due to the noise.

Sehr is not alone. Her neighbour Byron Green, 54, has had to move out of his main bedroom to escape the racket. He said the noise creates a “lower echo” chamber at night and makes living there in the summer difficult.

The former council worker, who has lived in the flat for 20 years, said: “You can always hear it. If I’ve got the television on then not so much but the main problem is that because of where it is, it’s a low echo-ey sound and causes vibrations as well.

“At night time it’s much worse because it’s quiet when there’s no traffic but that means it’s really obvious when someone goes past and hits the manhole cover. It’s a stark contrast and much more jarring.”

He said that late at night cars tend to drive faster because there’s no traffic on the road, causing what feels like an amplification of the noise.

Byron claims the issue began around seven years ago when a biking superhighway was installed across the road. He said this led to a narrowing of the carriageway and the manhole being pushed to the centre of a lane from its original spot in the gutter. Since then, he claims TfL workers have been on the back foot trying to repair the noise.

TfL responded to the LDRS to say it has launched an internal investigation into the matter.

Lambeth council was approached for comment but did not get back in time for publication.

Pictured top: Byron Green lives in a flat above the noisy manhole in Harleyford Road in Lambeth (Picture: Adrian Zorzut)