Dorchester residents have carried out a litter blitz on their local area after becoming sick and tired of rubbish piling up in their neighbourhood.

Tracy Privett, of Hawthorne Close, decided to take action in response to the rising amount of litter and fly tipping she was encountering.

She went around other houses dropping off a leaflet, inviting other residents to join her in a litter pick in a bid to tackle the problem.

Tracy said: “I had lived in the area previously and then moved away to another part of Dorchester.

“When I came back over the two or three years I had been away it had just begun to look really messy and it hadn’t looked like that before.

“So I just thought that with a few of the neighbours we would just have a bit of a clean.”

Ten people turned out to help with the clean-up operation, with tabards, litter pickers, gloves and rubbish bags provided by West Dorset District Council and the Dorset Campaign to Protect Rural England.

The litter pick was also supported by the Dorchester Stop the Drop campaign, which is aiming to crack down on littering in the county town.

The residents covered Hawthorne Road, Hawthorn Close, Mountain Ash Road, Prospect Road, St Thomas Road and the alleyways in between.

Within an hour and a half the team collected a dozen bags of litter between them as well as a pile of rugs that had been dumped and a fish tank.

Tracy said: “I think we were all a bit surprised with just how much we collected.

“When it’s spread out over a great area it’s not quite that marked.

“It’s amazing what you can find in a short space of time.”

Tracy said she and her fellow litter pickers did not want to point the finger at anyone in particular for the mess but wanted to encourage all residents to work together to keep the area tidy in the future.

She said: “We have not done it to be superior, we have done it because we wanted to tidy up where we lived and it would be nice if the community got behind us and kept it that way.”