Hawkshead man cleaning up area one sign at a time

Tim Brown has been tackling waymarkers around Hawkshead and Claife in an effort to have them looking their best for locals and visitors alike.

“I’m quite particular, a little bit OCD, I like everything in its place and tidy,” said Mr Brown, 47.

“It’s just purely local pride, a passion for things being right and kept in check, just a bit obsessively tidy, and everything that comes under my remit gets polished, cleaned, put straight.”

Mr Brown, of Hawkshead, works part-time as a lengthsman for Hawkshead and Claife Parish Councils. It is in this role that he does the cleaning.

As a lengthsman, he keeps road grids clear of mud and debris and ensures saplings are cut back.

CLEANER: Tim Brown

Mr Brown, who works full-time for Myerscough College, near Preston, estimated he had cleaned around 50 signs since he began as a lengthsman in November 2019.

He said he had begun ‘creeping outside of my boundary’, cleaning signs beyond his area voluntarily, such as a ‘really filthy’ one to the east of Coniston.

Mr Brown posted the results of his efforts to the ‘I love the Lake District’ page on Facebook and said it was like ‘letting off a grenade’.

He said: “I put quite a few posts up there of the local area, scenery-wise, and they often get a handful of likes and comments, and then I put the one up with the signs, and it went to over 3,000 likes, 250-plus comments, lots of praise saying ‘I wish there were more people like you’, ‘could you come to our area?’.”

Mr Brown is on his second ‘cycle’ of cleaning now, with some of the signs he initially cleaned having become dirty again.

“Within the last 12 months, they’ve gone from being scrubbed up clean to having a green scum build up again,” he said.

There is no magic ingredient to his cleaning - he simply sets out with a bucket of warm water and a sponge.

He says all anyone needs to have is tolerance for ‘all the dirty water running down your forearm’.