Gaming shop flooded 56 times in battle with South West Water over faulty pipes

To be flooded with sewage 27 times in your first year of trading and to lose £100,000 in earnings is simply catastrophic for a new business

- by OLIVIER VERGNAULT

NEIL Potter is angry. Since opening his specialist gaming and Pokemon shop three years ago he has been run ragged fighting a constant battle with South West Water.

Game On Cornwall in Market Place, Penzance, has been forced to close, losing trade, after being flooded with sewage on 56 occasions since October 2022.

For Neil and his wife Amy the issue with the utility company has been a massive uphill battle.

"To be flooded with sewage 27 times in your first year of trading and to lose £100,000 in earnings is simply catastrophic for a new business," Neil said. "South West Water finally started doing the work to fix the issue three weeks ago. That's taken 150 emails, dozens of calls, face-to-face meetings in Plymouth and Exeter and three delays from them before they started the work.

"It took them nine months to simply accept that it was their manhole cover and pipes. In those nine months alone our shop was flooded 14 times."

Neil has been trading in antiques in the town for two decades but opened the gaming shop in late 2022 with the aim of becoming the place to be for the gaming and geek community to congregate and have a space to socialise.

With two floors above the shop, his grand idea had always been to open the first gaming hotel in the UK: but, with unresolved flooding issues and piping that struggled to cope with one toilet, let alone the planned seven bedrooms, he's had to put the idea on hold - for now.

"It would have been unsafe to proceed," he said. "We couldn't add seven bedrooms when the plumbing wouldn't support it and there's a broken sewage pipe running under the floor.