People living next to an alleyway in south Manchester that has been used as a spot for fly-tipping have said they are ‘fed up’ with constantly having to tidy it up themselves.
The residents of Langport Avenue in Ardwick say they have been responsible for cleaning up the alleyway for the last few years after waiting for Manchester Council to respond to reports of the fly-tipping.
And they say they recently found bullets and a large knife when clearing up the rubbish recently.
Sirous Fallahi, 30, lives nearby and says he has been contacting Manchester Council about the ‘dangerous’ alleyway and overgrown hedges for the past year but nothing has changed yet.
“We’ve been left to clean it all up ourselves,” Sirous tells the M.E.N.
“I’ve tried cleaning it up to make it look nice and get rid of the mess, but you’ll come back the next day and it’ll be full of rubbish again.”
Sirous says that whenever he cleans up the alleyway, which is classed as an unadopted piece of land, he can usually get around ten bin bags full of rubbish.
While dumped items have usually been general waste and litter, Sirous recently discovered a knife and discarded bullets sprawled across the alleyway.
“I was tidying the alleyway up recently and I found about 20 bullets in a bag and a machete knife,” he says.
“It’s now becoming quite dangerous stuff that’s just being left, we’ve got children on the avenue and they have to avoid the alleyway and walk around the gardens instead.”
The alleyway is also located less than 100m from two schools.
“People will often use the alleyway to go back and forth from the schools,” Sirous adds.
“It’s concerning what they could discover.”
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Sirous says he has contacted Manchester Council on multiple occasions about the fly-tipping but says ‘nothing has been done about it so far’.
“Whenever I contact them, they say they will arrange for someone to come and clean it up but nothing’s been done,” he says.
“That’s why I’ve ended up doing most of it myself with the help of a few other neighbours.”
Residents have recently made suggestions to Manchester Council of gates or extra street lights to prevent fly-tipping, but they say they have been told it’s not possible due to budget requirements.
“Having to look at it all the time makes me feel sick basically,” Sirous adds.
“There’s often people gathering in the alleyway smoking and leaving behind gas cylinders.
“I was recently tidying up and found a bunch of letters from an address nearby, so I collected them up and returned them to the address on them.
“The owners were shocked when they opened the door and said it must have been one of the previous tenants.
“Whoever it is, they’ve made the effort to walk over here, which takes about three minutes, to intentionally dump their rubbish in our alleyway when they have two large blue bins in their garden.”
Manchester Council said the respective teams have been notified about the litter and hedgerows, and both have been marked down for cleansing.
Councillor Rabnawaz Akbar, executive member for neighbourhoods, said: “All of our residents deserve to be able to live in areas free of litter, which is why it is deeply frustrating to see our neighbourhoods negatively impacted by the dumping of waste.
“We want people to be able to feel pride in where they live, but also reassured that the Council will work to clamp down on this sort of behaviour.”
From September 1, 2018 to August 21, 2020, Manchester Council’s waste contractor Biffa responded to 301 incidents in the Ardwick area.
More than £6,500 in fixed penalty notices have been served in the ward, and 477 actions undertaken by Biffa, whether that is a warning letter to a resident, or fixed penalty notices, or other enforcement action.
