‘It’s ruined me’: Landscape gardener may lose business after thieves steal ‘pride and joy’ Land Rover work truck

Jamie Dobinson, 30, saved for years to buy the £13,000 vehicle, and spent another £4,000 kitting it out so he could start up his Crafted Landscapes business. He parked his “pride and joy” outside his flat in Cantelupe Road, Bexhill, at 3.30pm on Tuesday (December 14) and when he left to go to work at 6.30am the next day, the Land Rover had gone and its number plates were lying on the ground. All his gardening tools were inside and he fears he might have to close his business.

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Jamie, who works across Rother, Hastings and Rye, said: “It’s literally ruined me. All my business is that truck. It’s an absolute nightmare. It’s just awful - I don’t know how people do it.” He added: “I just pray it’s going to be found because I’ve spent a lot of money getting all the branding, and I’ve had it adapted with side shutters on there. It’s got a winch, a roof rack. It’s cost me thousands. I hope the insurance company are going to pay for it but you know what they’re like. They’ll probably try and get out of it. But the ideal thing would be getting it back. I just pray it’s still around.”

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He said he has no idea how the thieves got away with it. “I had a clutch claw on it, a steering lock, and it’s got a tracker fitted, so what I think they’ve done is literally pulled it up on to a low loader and taken it away and chucked a sheet over it. Because if they were driving it around, someone would see it. A lot of people know me and my business. And even if it had started up, I reckon I would have heard it because my bedroom window is right near where it’s parked, and I had it open, so I think they might have pulled it on to a truck and just shipped it off. It’s devastating.”

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Jamie added: “It’s a massive problem for me because I’ve put so much money into it. I thought I’d buy myself a decent truck so people know I’m a bit different and I’m passionate about what I do. I saved up for a long time to get a Defender because that’s what I wanted. It’s full of tools as well and I don’t know how I’m going to get it all back.”

He said he can’t run his business unless he gets it back. “I’ve got two big projects on at the moment that I was trying to get done before Christmas, but there’s no hope now. It’s just a joke.”

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He said his Land Rover “looks so distinctive, and that is the trouble because people look at something like that and think, ‘that’s worth money, I’ll take that’. I’ve always lived in the countryside and I’ve just my first property - in Bexhill - thinking this will be a nice quiet area. And I’ve been there three weeks and it’s been stolen. It couldn’t be worse really.”

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He phoned 999 as soon as he discovered his Land Rover had been stolen, but said Sussex Police “weren’t much help. They just said, ‘well we haven’t got the manpower to look at all the cameras.’ They said, ‘your best bet is to share it on social media. That’s what they were like.” He told them he’d found the number plates on the ground and asked whether they wanted to take fingerprints, but they said the plates had been outside all night so they wouldn’t get any fingerprints from them. “I thought, ‘come on, there must be something you can do.’ But I suppose they haven’t got the funding, I don’t know.”

His silver and green Land Rover Defender, registration WF58 KJU, is branded with the name of his business - Crafted Landscapes Architecture & Design.