By NOEL MURPHY
A GRAFFITI assault is making Minerva Rd a grubby, untidy mess, according to frustrated residents of Manifold Heights and Herne Hill.
Vandals have targeted shops, houses, fences, bus stop shelters, postboxes and toilets with tags Turk, Mojoh, Rosie One, Dank and Rose.
The graffiti, in characters up to two metres high, stretches from Church St in the north to Peter Lowe Reserve 500 metres south.
Bill Mundy said a disused milk bar next door to his family’s mechanical business typified the worst of the attack.
“It’s a real eyesore for people living in the street,” he said.
“People using the bus stop there have to put up with it all, too.”
Neighbour David McDougall agreed the vandalism had ruined a pleasant neighbourhood.
“It’s a pain, an eyesore,” he said.
The disused milk bar is covered in spray-can graffiti. Faded advertising signs sit alongside garish orange and blue graffiti across the shop’s windows, tiles, doors, wooden hoardings and walls.
Bus shelter panels are similarly defaced, along with timetables, fences, post-boxes and toilets at the nearby reserve.
“It’s no good us painting over it, we don’t know what they’ll do next,” Mr Mundy said.
“The first graffiti appeared about a year ago and it wasn’t too bad. But now they’ve got it everywhere and they’re adding a little bit extra all the time.”
Mr Mundy said he had contacted City Hall about the graffiti without any response.
The City’s Gary Van Driel said contractors would remove graffiti from fences and bus shelters in Minerva Rd, Herne Hill, over the next few days.
Council was working with the owner of a defaced and disused milk bar to have it cleaned as soon as possible, he said.
