A HARROW civil servant was beaten senseless and left for dead as he waited for a bus home after a New Year's Eve party.

Will Stoodley feels “lucky to be alive” after the terrifying and unprovoked attack that left him with a possible fractured skull, heavily swollen face and unable to go back to work for at least a fortnight.

He was found by a member of the public lying in a pool of his own blood at around 2.45am, unconscious and in need of emergency medical treatment, after his journey home from the party in Ruislip ended with him being attacked by a group of teenagers.

The boys started hurling abuse at 44-year-old Mr Stoodley as made the short walk from Harrow-on-the-Hill tube station to the bus station to catch his bus home.

They accused the Land Registry worker of following a teenage girl into the bus station and quickly surrounded him, despite his protest that he was simply waiting for a bus.

Then he was punched in the face and smashed over the head with a blunt object, knocking him unconscious.

He said: “I feel lucky very to still be alive, it feels like they tried to kill me.

“The attack was so over the top, they really laid into me - and in a way I feel sorry for them for doing it.

“I am so puzzled what makes youth be that aggressive when it is for absolutely no purpose.”

Police are now trying to piece together what happened to Mr Stoodley after the first blow and when he was found lying in the road near to Primark.

Mr Stoodley, who is the Public and Commercial Services Union chair in the borough and works at Lyon House in Harrow town centre, has been signed off work for the next two weeks, and has to regularly return to the hospital for further tests and scans.

He says he has been left with a “hole in his head” from the initial blow and gets daily headaches which force him to go and rest.

A new police team is being established specifically to target the area around the bus and tube stations in the town centre and Mr Stoodley said it could not come too soon.

He said: “It would do the area a world of good if it was to be permanently policed.

“The police are still investigating what happened to me, but I think an increased presence would certainly help stop the same kind of thing happening again.”

Officers are still gathering evidence on the attack on Mr Stoodley, of Headstone Gardens, and no arrests have been made so far.