Mobile tyre fitting
in Godstow.

A fitter at your car
in Godstow.

There is very little of Godstow, and that shapes what happens when a tyre fails. The A34 Western By-pass runs close by, so the serious damage tends to arrive from there, while the lanes towards Lower Wolvercote, Binsey and Wytham account for the slow punctures and the scuffed rims. A car with a flat out here is usually stopped somewhere narrow. Say where it is standing and how much room there is beside it, and the fitter arrives prepared.

Drives, bays and car parks.

A drive or a gateway with hard ground under it is the target. Failing that, a straight piece of lane where the car can sit fully in and the van can sit behind it, both of them visible to anything coming along. A soft verge is no use to a jack, and nor is a slope. What is not on offer is the A34 or its slip roads at any point, and there is no public parking in the hamlet to fall back on when the weather turns.

Godstow has no shops, no station and nothing resembling a public car park, so there is nowhere here to arrange to meet. What it has is a scatter of properties and the lanes running between Lower Wolvercote, Upper Wolvercote, Wytham and Binsey, most of them narrow enough that a stopped car becomes an obstruction in its own right. That is the genuine constraint: a wheel can only come off where the vehicle is clear of the only way through, so a gateway, a yard or a private drive is what the fitter looks for first. The A34 lies a few hundred yards away and the A40 Northern By-pass not much further, which is how the van reaches the hamlet, and also how most of the damage reaches the car.