Folkestone's Bloggered

 Just a typical sight outside the towns' Sainsburys every day, in fact, I have never seen it this bad anywhere else I have lived in the country. I lived mostly in Bexley, and more recently in Lincolnshire and Nottingham, before moving back to my home county.

This is the same outside KFC, Iceland, the Folca building, the Premier shop in Sandgate Road, and every boarded-up shop in the town centre.

This is what Folkestone has now become: a warehouse for drunks, druggies and their dealers, beggars and rough sleepers, with many having dogs with them.

It certainly never was noticeable to me in March 2023 when I moved to the town centre, not throughout 2024, but then suddenly in 2025, we seemed to be overrun by an invasion of mostly white middle-aged men and a small number of women, all aggressively high on alcohol or drugs or an addictive diet of the two.

Last year, we saw an explosion of these aggressive miscreants arriving on our town centre streets, the Leas and the Remembrance Gardens. Every day we saw new faces rocking up with sleeping bags, roll mats and ruck-sacks, tents, etc. and usually with a can of alcohol in their hands or a blue plastic bag with a 4 pack inside.

All, without exception, looked dishevelled and unkempt. They still do, as it seems more arrive daily; we seldom, if ever, miss going a day without seeing a new face around town.

How do they function? Well, a certain organisation 🌈🌈 will help them open a bank account with Santander, one of the only banks that will give a debit account to the homeless with no fixed abode.

The same organisation will direct them to the council offices to claim to be homeless, as the council has a legal responsibility to help them with emergency housing.

The same organisation  🌈🌈 will help the homeless with accessing benefits, even if they live on the streets, and they get help with Universal Credit.

People sleeping on the streets in the UK are generally entitled to the same basic welfare benefits as anyone else, with, as of April 2026, single people over 25 typically receiving a standard Universal Credit allowance of £424.90 per month.

Universal Credit (Single, under 25): Approximately £338.58 per month.
Universal Credit (Single, 25 or over): Approximately £424.90 per month.

No Fixed Address Claiming: Individuals can use a day centre, council office, or other care-of address to apply for benefits.

So £424.90 per month is about £14 a day, more than enough for a street drinker to get drunk on every day as they get breakfast and meals from various charities in Folkestone.

The same organisation will direct them to a GP practice to register. I've seen that happen myself at my clinic, where someone rocked up to be registered and told the receptionist that, in this case, they were sent there by a local charity.

So back to Sainsburys, and I'm sorry if anyone thinks I'm wrong saying this, but it's a fact that I have seen and so have my friends. The chap in the wheelchair and I have no idea how he lost his leg. I doubt it in any war, as he does not appear to me to have any former military bearing about him. He is often drunk and aggressive. He always seems to have a black can of cider in his hand and frequents the Pleydell Gardens disabled toilet with usually one other chap.

Today he was crashed out behind the shopping trolleys as so many others seem to do with a woman who was absolutely drunk out of her face. Not a nice sight for anyone grappling to get a shopping trolley. Often, someone is sitting outside begging for money. Yesterday, as we walked past KFC, we were asked for change by a middle-aged man sitting on the path with a beer can next to him.

Why do these shops and restaurants allow this to happen? Do they not see it as having a damaging effect on their businesses? I guess they get fed up with calling the police, who seem to do nothing.

 Residents/shoppers of Folkestone town centre, the police 👮👮, the council, councillors and our MP, not to mention all these charities 🌈🌈 ⛪ who might mean well but are actually sucking these people into Folkestone, seem to be blind to what is happening. Do none of them see what cumulative effect these people's behaviour is having on visitors and tourists to our town, and how it affects the shops and restaurants' trade? Local residents can see what is happening around them; they are not blind. Once seen, you can't unsee these people; they are everywhere around town. I, for one, never shop in Iceland because of the numbers sitting outside, and I won't go to KFC for the same reason.

So the black can of lager on top of the shopping trolleys outside Sainsbury's is Karpackie beer, it is a Polish beer known for its high-alcohol variants, particularly the 9% ABV. (Alcohol By Volume). Standard beers are usually 4-7%. These strong beers sell for about £1.50 a can, so you can get totally wasted with just 2 cans, but these people have enough benefit money to buy a 6 pack every day and will steal, beg or borrow to buy more.

Locally, traders have told us that shoplifting has reached new levels in recent years in the town. The local police confirmed this to us in a meeting we had with them a year ago, which we as local residents organised in a community room.

As you can see, the Premier Shop in Sandgate Road is like many other licensed premises around Folkestone, which sell cheap, high-intoxicating cans of cider and lager for as little as £1.50 a can.

Our 2 hardworking and dedicated street Veolia cleaners around town will tell you that all they do is pick up mostly black cans of cider, as you can get drunk faster and cheaper on cider than you can on lager. Never a day goes by that my friends or I will not pick up several cans from the Leas, the streets, and the churchyard at the Bayle.

I used to pick up half a dozen every morning in the Rememberance Gardens, but stopped going there last August when the council suddenly put up dogs-on-lead signs on the bins that the drunks never use because they don't know what a bin is for.

Some days, as many as a dozen drunks are sitting in these Remembrance Gardens in Sandgate Road, some with dogs. They are loud, aggressive, threatening, and intimidating, and their language is disgusting. Many people don't cut through the gardens anymore; instead, they walk around them to avoid walking between them, as they block the pathway.

God help us as local residents this summer, and to our local businesses, but not to the shops that supply these people with cheap, strong alcohol, as they don't care about the impact it is having locally to local people who feel like we are living in a Charles Dickens Victorian East End of London street with all the Fagins, Artful Dodgers, Bill Sykes, Nancys and Bulls Eye their dogs wandering about half drunk, half crazed that taxpayers are funding.

Where many of my friends and I live, which is almost opposite these Remembrance Gardens, we see these people openly urinating and defecating in the gardens and in our side streets and shop doorways. Many residential blocks of flats, many for the elderly who have retired here, have suffered attempts to break into our premises by these people, hoping to bed down somewhere for the night.

Many women locally have told us that they will not go out alone around the town at night. My friends and I have stopped venturing out at night on the Leas Promenade as it's not worth the risk or trouble.

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