Two tyres can go down for reasons that look identical from outside and end very differently. A puncture is something sharp pushed through the tread: a screw, a nail, a shard of steel off a skip. It parts the casing cords rather than cutting them, it leaves a neat hole, and if it sits inside the central band of the tread it can be repaired to the recognised standard and driven on for the rest of that tyre's working life.
A pinch is not a hole at all. It happens when the tyre meets a hard edge and is squeezed between that edge and the rim flange behind it, and the damage is done from the inside out. The cords in the lower casing are crushed and broken, usually leaving a pair of short parallel splits on the inner liner that you will never see while the tyre is on the wheel. From outside there may be nothing to find: no nail, no cut, just a tyre that keeps going soft for no apparent reason. That one cannot be repaired, because structure has been cut rather than pierced and no patch replaces a broken cord. Which of the two you have is not a matter of opinion, and it is why the tyre comes off the rim before anybody gives you an answer.
Sometimes the tyre is fine and the valve has failed. That is what we do first, on the drive in Stepney or wherever the car has stopped, before anybody starts talking about repairs or replacements. Steep camber in Stepney? We move a few metres, Shadwell or anywhere else. Blocked drive in Spitalfields? Open kerb in Commercial Road? Either works.
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The kerbs and junctions along Commercial Road, and the pinch points around the market on Whitechapel Road, catch more tyres than loose debris ever does, and impact damage is behind these calls more often than most drivers assume. It is also the sort that gets driven on, because there is nothing to see and the tyre only sinks slowly. If a tyre is losing air and the tread is clean, topping it up and carrying on is the one thing not to do. The answer is on the inside of the tyre, and we can have it off the rim where the car is parked.
A car parked near the Spitalfields edge had picked up a long screw right in the middle of the tread. It sat well inside the repairable band, the cords around it were intact, and it was patched from the inside and back on the car inside the hour.
A tyre off a car on Commercial Road had nothing whatever to find on the outside. Broken down off the rim it showed the pair of short cuts across the liner that a hard edge leaves behind, and that ended the discussion.
Two calls in one night, both reported as slow punctures near the town centre. One was a nail and a straightforward repair. The other was impact damage from a kerb and a new tyre, and neither driver could have told which was which.
A puncture is something sharp going in through the tread and pushing the casing cords apart. A pinch is the tyre being crushed against the rim by a kerb or a pothole, which breaks those cords from the inside. One leaves a hole that can be sealed. The other has taken away structure.
Because a patch seals a hole, it does not replace cord. The cords carry the load, and once a run of them has been cut the tyre has lost strength at that spot permanently. Covering the split over would hide the damage without doing a thing about it.
That is one of the classic signatures of a pinch, along with a leaking valve and a damaged rim seat. All three are found the same way, by taking the tyre off the wheel and looking at the inside of it. Guessing from the outside is how a car ends up back on a broken tyre.
In the central band, roughly the middle three quarters of the tread width, with limits on how big the injury can be. That is the British Standard BS AU 159 that DVSA-compliant repairs are made to. Outside that band, in the shoulder or the sidewall, no repair is permitted whatever it happens to look like.
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