Building inspectors have been alerted to the partial collapse of the front of a house on Ventnor’s Zig Zag Road.
Stonework at the front of the house has fallen away from around the bay windows, crashing into the garden below. Damage has been caused to a garden fence as a result, leading to concerns for public safety.
The decision has been taken to erect temporary traffic lights on Zig Zag Road whilst the situation is assessed. This keeps both pedestrians and motorists away from the immediate danger zone.
Interestingly, similar damage – that has not yet been fully repaired – is evident to the neighbouring property.
Partial building collapses in Ventnor are not unheard of. In September 2019 a family had to be evacuated from a property on St Catherine’s Street. Before that, in July 2017, there were significant concerns for the stability of a property at Alexandra Gardens.
It was just 2 years ago that a landslide at The Grove – not far from Zig Zag Road – led to 2 people becoming trapped inside their home.
Ventnor is a very dodgy area to buy property, best to give it a miss….
Ventnor must be the last place anybody would want set up home in with all the ground movement.
Another crumbling edifice!! Houses,hotels,floating bridges,shops,roads,public transport…you you name it.It’s just another symbol of the state of the island.
10,000 alcoholics clinging to a cliff.
Houses need maintenance, wherever they are located.
Hey teacher leaves kids alone just brick in the wall
Clearly lack of maintenance. The stone arch needed the mortar repacking, as the arch support only works when each stone in the arch is tightly forced against the next
Weather washes away the mortar over years and slate needs tapping into the joints to keep the pressure on the arch and then repoint
Their door also needs painting.
I guess this property is 150 plus years old and most people that own an old property accept you do need to upkeep them. With the mix of construction in older buildings with wood stone that in the picture seems in good condition. The failure looks like from perhaps a get over job of applying modern banding over the stonework to try and tie it together which has held for a number of years until the banding has rusted I guess. I would ask how many of the present new buildings will still be standing in 150 years and say other than heating old property they are greener than a lot of newer properties that have been demolished.
Dare I say it lack of fully qualified, experienced builders to deal with these ancient buildings. Building techniques seem to have diminished in some building works of late. Sometimes the old methods were the best, at least in older houses you get decent room sizes and ceiling heights.
You won’t find many qualified or experienced builders on the Isle of Wight. Just men who think they are.
You’ve got single glazed timber framed rotten windows upstairs with little or no pointing to the supporting brickwork resulting in no thermal insulation and huge fuel bills, and an obvious lack of any preventative maintenance throughout both properties.. I would guess at rented properties but either way they are owned by someone who just doesn’t care. Such a shame and possibly nothing to do with land movement, just a ‘sod it’ attitude to bricks and mortar.
You don’t know who lives in the house, your guesses about the nature of occupation and the attitude of the home owners is
untrue and unkind.
So nothing to do with the massive rebuild directly adjacent over the past 2 years which happened to incorporate a semi-basement car park then? I would have thought it was bad enough the owners have had to put up with all the noise, inconvenience and heavy lorries during that time. But to find out there’s now instability..