Staff at a specialist crash recovery company had to rack their brains to work out how to remove the car from the building.

A structural engineer from Peterborough City Council was on hand to advise experts from Ratcliffe Heavy Recovery on how to bring down the Volvo, which had ploughed through a window and demolished a good chunk of brickwork.

The full story: Werrington crash
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The specialists drew up a plan and then spent between one and two hours dismantling some of the wall and lifting the vehicle out of the building using a mobile crane.

The company's Bill Ratcliffe said: "I don't think we have ever had to remove a vehicle from an upstairs floor of a building.

"We do get called to jobs when vehicles have gone into downstairs rooms, but never upstairs ones.

"We have been going for 80 years now, and it is true that we get called out to some unusual incidents."

Neighbours stunned by accident

Stunned residents who had heard the commotion gathered at the crash scene in Werrington and many used mobile phones to take photographs.

Pieces of bumper and fragments of car lay strewn on a verge next to the Werrington Parkway roundabout, where the car had clearly hit the roundabout and ripped branches off the top of bushes when it became airborne.

Neighbours from the block of maisonettes in Danish Court were visibly in shock as scores of firefighters, police officers and paramedics got to work in the usually sleepy cul-de-sac.

Beatrice Tanyanyiwa said she was in bed when she was woken up by an almighty crash.

Scared that her young son had fallen in the kitchen, she got up to investigate.

She said "I was woken up by this loud bang.

"Luckily, my son was OK, so we went out to see what had happened. It was unbelievable. How can a car fly in the air like an aeroplane?"

Passing motorist Kingsley Harrison said: "People were taking photos of it on their mobile phones."