One Derbyshire road is going one-way until December, and it’s not just an inconvenience

Tamworth Road in Long Eaton goes one-way southbound until December, as Erewash Borough Council widens the town’s pavements. Here’s why a footway scheme needs four months of traffic management.

Image: Erewash Borough Council

One road through Long Eaton is about to do a simple but maddening thing: work in only one direction for months.

The southbound lane of Tamworth Road closed from 7pm on Sunday 2 August, between the Market Place/Nottingham Road roundabout and the Broad Street junction, and Erewash Borough Council says the restriction will stay in place until December. Northbound traffic keeps moving as normal.

On paper, that’s a small adjustment. In practice, it’s four months of a different town.

In brief:

• Tamworth Road in Long Eaton is one-way southbound until December
• Drivers are being diverted via Wilsthorpe Road or Fields Farm Road
• Erewash Borough Council says the closure supports a £10m town centre revamp, including pavement widening

The cause isn’t a pothole or a burst pipe. It’s the pavement being widened, as part of a wider £10 million project the council says will “breathe new life into” Long Eaton town centre. That distinction matters more than it looks. Four months sounds disproportionate to “wider pavements” until you consider what widening a footway next to a live carriageway actually requires: continuous protected working space along the kerb line, room to store materials, and a layout stable enough to hold through reinstatement and inspection without resetting the site every few days. A resurfacing crew works in short bursts and moves on. Widening a footway means staying on the same stretch for months, so the traffic management has to stay put too.

That’s also likely why the scheme has defaulted to a directional closure rather than temporary signals squeezing two-way traffic past a live site. In a town centre setting, with tight carriageways and little spare width at the kerb, taking one direction out of use entirely can create more usable working space than stop-start signals ever would, even though it removes a movement drivers are used to making.

For residents, that trade-off just feels like a longer journey. The council has set out a specific diversion: traffic wanting to head south into Tamworth Road is being sent via Wilsthorpe Road or Fields Farm Road, while northbound traffic from the A6005 heading for the Lawrence Street car park can still reach it via Fletcher Gate. There’s a sharper edge to the first week specifically, between 2 and 7 August, the council has also flagged likely night-time closures from 7pm to 5am, and the Market Place taxi rank is closed for the duration, moved temporarily to Main Street outside the 3 Counties Snooker hall. Bus users are being pointed to trentbarton for how the closures affect routes.

None of that is dramatic on its own. Taken together, it’s a reminder of what “one road, one-way” actually involves once you look past the traffic order itself: rerouted taxis, revised bus information, night closures layered on top of a daytime restriction, and a diversion route that has to hold up for four months rather than four days. Erewash Borough Council has apologised for the inconvenience and stressed that businesses along the route will stay open throughout, which is really the test this kind of scheme is judged against locally. The road engineering is rarely the hard part. Keeping a town centre functioning while you do it is.

For Long Eaton drivers, the practical takeaway is straightforward: expect the diversion, expect it to run until December, and allow extra time for the trip, which is exactly what the council itself is asking.