Streets sweepers are the 'Invisible hand' keeping Bradford's gutters and pavements litter free. Reporter Charles Heslett, above and right, went on the road with brush in hand to get a street view of the job.

WE'VE ALL done it - casually discarded a finished cigarette or surreptitiously spat out a piece of flavourless chewing gum onto the pavement.

It only takes a split second but for Bradford Council's army of about 150 street sweepers it creates the two biggest problems they have to face day-in, day-out.

Street sweeping has changed dramatically in the last couple of years with the introduction of manually-operated pavement sweepers, some of which you can even sit-in.

They can tear along open stretches of pavements devouring the garbage in front of them but hopefully not the pedestrians!

But when it comes to picking a cigarette butt out of a pavement crack or retrieving a burger wrapper in a hard to reach place there's still no substitute for the dexterity of a person's fingers.

Personally keeping the streets neat Bradford's town centre could quite easily be my vision of a punishment from hell.

I was given Kirkgate as my patch but no sooner had I cleared up an area of litter then some know-it-all kid had thrown down a sweet paper, bouncing it off my barrow first.

As I calmly bent down to pick it up a frenetic businessman crushed a cigarette under his foot, leaving it smouldering on the pavement...and so it went on until half an hour later it was just as bad as when I started.

To say the job could be soul destroying is no exaggeration as a sea of people march through the city centre dropping their litter almost unconsciously.

You just don't see it happen unless you're looking for it. And that's not even mentioning the extent of the cigarette and chewing gum problem.

It's something as a normal pedestrian I'd never even noticed but a quick sweeping session around bins and benches revealed literally hundreds of burnt out stubs and squashed blobs of chewing gum.

As principal cleansing officer John Turner explained, the problem is not only costly but time consuming.

He said: "Cigarettes and chewing gum are our worst problems. We now have special high powered jets to get the chewing gum off the pavements.

"But this has to take place at night when there aren't as many people around. Sometimes you can spend half a minute getting one piece of chewing gum free. Imagine how long that translates to for every piece we come across."

Surprisingly when it comes to cleaning the district's town centres another problem isn't so much the amount of litter but getting access to clear it away.

Mr Turner said: "The thing that can really prevents us from doing our job properly is cars parked and left overnight on the streets. Our larger street sweepers have no choice but to go round them."

But the message to the general public is simple from a street cleaner's point of view - dispose of your spent cigarettes and chewing gum properly and the battle's half won!

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.