THE devastated wife of a businessman who suffered life-changing head injuries after a fall in a busy town centre has called for bikes to be banned from pedestrianised areas.

Grandfather Brian Coates has lost his ability to communicate and can only talk “gobbledegook” as a result of a blood clot on his brain, caused when he hit his head on the pavement in Darlington town centre last month.

Doctors have told his wife, Mary, there are no guarantees her husband will ever fully recover.

Mr Coates was walking along Skinnergate at about 1.45pm on Friday, September 5 when he fell at the junction with Post House Wynd.

Witnesses reported that three young boys on bikes were close to the 74-year-old but it is not clear whether they knocked into him or simply startled him and caused him to lose his bearings.

Despite a number of appeals no-one has come forward to explain what happened.

Six weeks on from the incident, Mrs Coates has called for bicycles to be banned from the pedestrian areas of Darlington and has spoken to the chief executive of Darlington Borough Council, Ada Burns, to make her case for new rules to be implemented.

After several weeks at James Cook University Hospital, Mr Coates is now being treated in the neuro-rehabilitation unit in Bishop Auckland Hospital.

Although he is conscious and can walk, Mr Coates’ communication skills have been seriously impaired and he needs constant care.

Mrs Coates, 69, said doctors have told her there are no guarantees about how long any recovery may take.

She said: “He can talk but it’s all gobbledegook. All they can tell us is that it’s going to be a long, slow process.

“I’m really quite angry about it all – Brian was fit and healthy and now he’s like an old man in a nursing home. I just think ‘how has this happened?’

“My life has just turned upside down.”

Mrs Coates said she and her family were not looking to blame the boys potentially involved in her husband’s accident but that they felt bikes should not be allowed in pedestrian areas.

Speaking about her telephone conversation with Ms Burns, she said: “She [Ms Burns] said they monitor incidents in the town centre and that they haven’t gone up – but what about near misses or those people that don’t report being knocked over?

“It seems utterly ridiculous that you can have a pedestrian zone that allows people on bikes to whizz around.”

A spokeswoman for Darlington Borough Council said that on average there is one incident involving a bike in Darlington town centre reported each year.

She added that the enforcement of cycling in pedestrian areas was a matter for Durham Police.

Anyone with information about the incident is asked to called Detective Sergeant Sarah Manser on non-emergency 101.