Additional reporting by Gabriel Morris

Fed-up residents claim their neighbourhood is being treated as a “junkyard” by fly-tippers.

Dirty mattresses, broken cinema seats and hardcore have been dumped inside and along a row of dilapidated garages in Kemsing Gardens, Hales Place, an estate popular with students in Canterbury.

Such is the state of the containers, some of which are missing their back walls, that longtime resident Paul Babra, 69, wants to move away from his home of 30 years.

Mr Babra tells the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “This is just becoming a junkyard. It’s been going on for many years now.

“Kemsing Gardens has just become like a dump yard for the people to come and just disappear.”

Mr Babra, who runs a catering business, says the area is going downhill.

He explains: “We’ve been living here and we’ve seen the state of this neighbourhood getting worse. A few years back we had a valuation of our property done by a local estate agent, we were getting a good fair amount at that time nearly five or six years back.

“We recently got it valued by another reputable local estate agent, and the value has gone down very very much. We want to get out of this neighbourhood.”

Mr Babra explained that some of the garages are owned by locals and he himself has one, but that the ownership of many of the dilapidated ones is uncertain.

He also said that he has urged Canterbury City Council (CCC) to do something about the state of the area, but has been disappointed by the response. However, the authority says it has been working hard to fix the issue, and preparations are underway to clear the land.

Amongst the mess sit several discarded CCC signs warning against fly-tipping.

Cllr Mel Dawkins (Lab), who represents the area on the city council, said: “I quite often get emails about fly-tipping in that area especially, it’s been on my radar for a long time.

“I find it very sad that people feel that they have to fly-tip, the actual tip is not very far from the garages in question.”

A spokesman for CCC said: "We sympathise with the plight of people living in Kemsing Gardens and have been working hard behind the scenes to find ways of helping them.

"The cause of this issue is simple - the fly-tippers taking advantage of derelict buildings on private land to dump their disgusting waste.

“But the solution is a complicated one.

“Preparations are underway to clear the land again. But this is expensive and comes at a huge cost to the council taxpayer. The danger is that the fly-tippers simply return to fill it again. We are doing all we can to hunt down the fly-tippers. When we catch them, we will push for the biggest possible punishment.

“It would not make sense to take on the derelict land ourselves - that would be time consuming and the council taxpayer would end up owning derelict land it cannot use but the council would be required to spend money on.”