A town centre underpass dubbed the ‘subway from hell’ has been transformed from a needle-strewn drug den to a clean and tidy passage by a mystery do-gooder.

When visited by KentOnline last week, the underground passageway in Cheriton Road, Folkestone, contained a sea of syringes, illicit paraphernalia and, bizarrely, children’s toys.

In response, a spokesman for Folkestone and Hythe District Council said a clean-up operation would be undertaken.

But when the authority’s crews arrived at the site a couple of days later, they found the alleyway had been magically transformed.

“A crew arrived on Monday morning to find only a small amount of litter including one needle – the subway certainly wasn’t in the same state as seen in the photos published on Sunday,” said a council spokesperson.

“The remaining debris was cleared by the team, while weeds were also removed at the same time.”

KentOnline first reported on the danger site in 2017, prompting the district council to clear up the waste.

But since then, the problem had become so much worse that volunteers for street cleaning group, Town Sprucers, refused to enter the subway.

The group’s lead, Peter Phillips, says if it was not council sanitation workers that braved the unsightly tunnel, he has no idea who it might have been.

“There was so much rubbish you would have needed a truck to take it all away,” said Mr Phillips.

“We cleared it up six years ago and we’ve done it a couple times since, but we haven’t touched it for a while because it’s too dangerous.

“It must have been the council who would have done it - there would have been nobody else who would have dared go down there.”

But when asked if they knew who cleaned up the underpass, a FHDC spokesman insisted: “We only know it didn’t look the same”.

The authority added that going forward the space would be checked more regularly.

Speaking about the troubled pathway last week, Mr Phillips had said: “It’s getting too bad for us.

“It’s too dangerous – I won’t send any teams down here.

“It’s the alleyway from hell. To think this goes on in this day and age, so close to where children pass, is absolutely madness.

“It has been like this for about six years now – it’s the kind of thing you’d expect to see in the Bronx in the 80s.

“You can easily get down here. You just walk a few metres down the ramp and you’re in one of the most vile places imaginable.”

It comes as Folkestone has recently featured heavily in the national media, often depicted as a well-heeled, almost glamorous town – even being described as “the new Brighton”.