• Kidbrooke Gardens is a flat piece of land that
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lies beside the new A2 Rochester Road. There is some wasteland, a couple of tennis courts, a stagnant pool and a derelict site at one side. At 3.30 in the morning it is not the most salubrious place, its only redeeming feature being the views it affords over Rochester Close, site of some of the worst flytipping in Greenwich. We staked out the area this week, waiting in the park through the early hours of the morning. We hoped to get a photograph of flytipping in progress, so we hid ourselves in the park and settled down to wait.
Rochester Close is the access road to the Greenwich Maritime museum store, sited at the end of the road. There are plans to build a large supermarket and light industrial buildings on the derelict sites, but for the moment the area has an abandoned atmosphere, which is just what flytippers need to carry out their business. It is the quiet, under-used roads near playing fields, and building developments that they look for.
Huge piles of black silt-like earth are dumped willy-nilly in the road. The security mailager for the Maritime Museum, John Stacey, has traced the earth to the Thames-side developments that are taking place near Tower and London Bridge. There are also tyres, concrete blocks and pieces of steel, none of which could have been loaded on lorries by hand. Some even bear the marks of the digger buckets that have done the loading.
Bathed in the orange sodium lights of the A2, Rochester Close resembles nothing, if not the anti-suicide bombing precautions of US bases in Beirut. Access to the Museum store can only be made by slowly dodging the randomly-spaced piles of earth. Stacey says that in May, the store was completely cut off by flytippers. In these circumstances a fire at the store would burn unhindered by the efforts of firemen, unable to get their appliances up the road.
Staking out the flytippers is a bit like waiting for a sunny day in a British summer. You know it will happen, the question is when. Stacey says they are getting so blatant that most tipping takes place in daylight. He has even caught some tippers trying to dump loads at midday.
The vehicles vary wildly in type and age. The most recent truck caught flytipping was an F-registration 7.5-tonne tipper, although the majority are old and battered. The only common feature is the absence of sign-writing on the sides of the vehicles. From the piles of rubbish it is clear that most of the flytippers are running 4x2 7.5-tonne GVW light-weight lorries. The dumped loads are too small to have come from 6 X4 or 8x4 vehicles, and it is doubtful whether such large lorries could turn round in the cramped Rochester Close after tipping.
It must be to the delight of most south-east Londoners that the A2 Rochester Way seems never to have known the meaning of a quiet period. Huge streams of 38-tonners whistle, roar, and grind their way down the road to the M25 and the Channel Ports. As we wait the A2 is the only source of movement.
At 4am a fox walks past our positions and sniffs the air. It gives us the fright of our lives, expecting, as we are, four-wheeled tippers, not four-legged animals. By 5am the rush hour has started on the A2, and shabby skip-loaders and small tippers are out in abundance.
The day dawns dull and over-cast. It has started to rain and we are uncomfortable in our hiding places. What looked like good cover at night is highly conspicuous by day, so we move to better positions behind the smashed corrugated iron sheets at the side of the Close. Our total so far is one insomniac walker and that errant fox. We have seen no flytippers. At 9am we abandon our positions, having seen nothing all night. It is a disappointment faced by the authorities on every stake-out.
Flytipping is a moveable breakfast that is greasy, tepid and unpalateable. Tracking down its perpetrators has exhausted the patience of the police, the Thames London Waste Regulation Authority, and Greenwich Borough Council. For our pains, we got no photographs, and there is no evidence except that which has gone before and now lies in the road.
Stacey gives all the registration numbers he records to the local police, but he understandably discourages his staff from tackling the possibly violent flytippers on their own. "Many of the vehicles seem to be bought at auction for cash, and are running on false number plates," he says. One of his staff has tried to stop the illegal tippers to no avail: "They just pushed me off, tipped and drove off," he says, "I got their numbers, but I don't think they care."