Canterbury Secures £25,000 to Tackle Chewing Gum on City Streets

A Sticky Problem, Finally Getting Attention

Walk down St Peter’s Street or Rose Lane on any given day and there it is — dark, flattened blobs ground into the paving, stubborn as you like. Canterbury City Council is now getting £25,000 to do something about it.

The funding comes from the Chewing Gum Task Force, a UK-wide scheme run by Keep Britain Tidy and set up by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Canterbury is one of 56 councils across the country to receive grants in the latest round, with more than £1.65 million handed out in total this year.

Where the Money Comes From

The task force is bankrolled by the gum manufacturers themselves — Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van Melle among them — which means it’s the industry picking up the tab for a mess directly linked to their own products. Canterbury City Council isn’t footing the entire bill for cleaning up someone else’s problem. Which, frankly, seems only fair.

And the scale of that problem is something. Keep Britain Tidy reckons around 77% of England’s streets carry gum staining. At retail sites, it’s 99%. Clearing it all up costs UK councils roughly £7 million every year — a persistent, grinding drain on public budgets that nobody much talks about.

Clean Streets and Changed Behaviour

Canterbury’s grant covers two things: shifting existing deposits and putting measures in place to stop fresh littering. That combination matters. Previous rounds of the scheme showed councils cutting gum littering by up to 80% within the first two months. Six months after clean-up and prevention materials went in, those lower levels were still holding.

Not a one-off scrub, then. The aim is to break the habit.

Across its first year, the task force helped 53 councils clean an estimated 2.5 square kilometres of pavement — bigger than 467 football pitches. Over four years, the programme has awarded grants totalling £6.46 million and funded cleaning of over 4.15 million square metres of paving.

What Canterbury Gets Out of It

For Canterbury, the practical benefit lands squarely in the city centre. St Peter’s Street and Rose Lane — both well-used pedestrian routes that take a hammering on market days and at weekends — are among the targeted locations. Cleaner pavements there ought to make a difference for shoppers and visitors, though whether anyone will actually notice is another matter.

The council says the grant is a practical way to improve the city’s streets by removing visible gum deposits and preventing repeat littering. If Canterbury’s results mirror those of other participating councils, it should also take some pressure off routine street-cleaning budgets.

But there’s a longer-term argument here too. Strong results in Canterbury would strengthen the case for rolling out similar schemes elsewhere in Kent — towns where gum staining is just as visible on the high street, but where no funding bid has yet been made.

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Key Takeaways

• Canterbury City Council has received £25,000 from the Chewing Gum Task Force to clean pavements and introduce anti-littering measures
• The grant is part of a wider UK scheme supporting 56 councils with more than £1.65 million this year, funded by gum manufacturers including Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van Melle
• Previous scheme participants cut gum littering by up to 80% within two months, with improvements still recorded six months later

What This Means for Kent Residents

If you live in or visit Canterbury, the most visible change should be on streets like St Peter’s Street and Rose Lane — both long overdue a proper clean. The council’s focus on behaviour change alongside the scrubbing means this isn’t meant to be a one-time fix. And if Canterbury’s results hold up, residents in other Kent towns might reasonably start asking why their councils haven’t put a bid in yet.