Residents fighting a "pothole crisis" in their town have staged a protest to force a council into action to fix crater-filled roads as soon as possible.

Those living in Tenterden have been calling for Kent County Council (KCC) to fill the many holes throughout the town.

David Ward, secretary of Tenterden Labour branch and a road safety campaigner, created a petition to highlight the severity of the potholes in Tenterden.

He then organised a protest which took place on Sunday to coincide with national pothole day on January 15.

The group met at East Cross – a road residents say is falling apart from potholes – where they held banners urging for the "dangerous roads" to be made safe.

So far, more than 500 people have signed the petition and Mr Ward says the support for action has been strong among the community.

"Tenterden’s pothole protest and petition shows that there is strong support for action to fix our dangerous roads," he said.

"It’s good to see KCC bringing forward planned long overdue repairs to the A28 at East Cross. This at least proves that popular demand for action gets results.

"But much more needs to be done to overcome the backlog of pothole repairs across Kent caused by government cuts to essential highway maintenance.

"This always was going to be a false economy as delays to mending potholes just causes greater costs to fix them and avoidable damage to people and vehicles."

Deputy mayor Sue Ferguson also attended the protest and said she is glad to see repair work has begun on the troubled road this week.

"I’ve been hounding Kent Highways for months about the poor state of the road, and so have others too including Mike Hill, Callum Knowles, Kayleigh Brunger-Randal, and David Ward who started his petition after Christmas," she said.

"However you’ve got to feel slightly sorry for Kent Highways with their budget restraints, and the weather really has been atrocious for the roads, however something must be done about the quality of work by the utility companies. They come along, dig up the road, and leave it in a poor state and it’s Kent Highways who have to sort it out.

"I really don’t understand why there isn’t more supervision of utility companies to make them reinstate the roads properly."

Temporary repairs were made to East Cross last week, but the road was back to its ruined state just four days later.

Now, KCC has taken further action and East Cross is currently closed throughout the night for the rest of this week for repairs on the road to be carried out.

A KCC spokesman said its highways team is aware of the issues caused by potholes on the A28 in Tenterden and the continued bad weather has a negative impact on the roads.

“The recent sub-zero weather conditions have had a damaging impact on the road surface. As soon as this was reported to us, we urgently sought to complete a temporary repair to remove immediate dangers," they said.

“Unfortunately, the continued bad weather meant the temporary repair broke up, causing further damage to the road surface.

“In line with KCC’s commitment to making sure our roads are suitable for vehicles to use, we are now working towards a full resurfacing of the affected area of the A28.

"Once a plan has been fully approved, the work will be carried out overnight and is expected to take place in the coming days.

“While this section of road was due for full resurfacing in the 2023/24 financial year, officers have re-prioritised our programme to bring this forward to address the serious conditions created by the poor weather.

“This is in line with our approach set out in the highways asset management plan, designed to prevent potholes in the future.”