A man had a lucky escape when a section of bricks fell from the top of a building in London during high winds.
CCTV footage showed the pedestrian walking past the building on Stoke Newington High Street, in northeast London, only a second or two before its parapet smashed to the ground on Sunday morning.
Winds of up to 70 miles per hour buffeted southern England on Sunday, the UK’s Met Office weather service said, causing trees to fall onto railway lines and scaffolding to collapse.
A spokesman for London Fire Brigade said no one was injured in the Stoke Newington incident.
The CCTV footage was captured from a supermarket opposite the building, according to Bobby Kasanga, who told CNN he was in the store fundraising for his local football team when the bricks crashed to the street.
“We were in the back of the store but when we heard the bricks crash down we ran outside to check what was going on,” he said. “Then we went back inside to watch the CCTV to see what happened and saw how lucky the guy was.”
“We called Hackney Council and they cordoned off the area as they weren’t sure if more debris would fall,” he added.
A planning application to demolish the building was withdrawn in 2010, according to a report in local paper the Hackney Gazette.
