Pensioner spends seven years and thousands of pounds keeping Portobello beach clean
Meet the 70-year-old clean-up crusader waging a seven-year war on Portobello beach litter
A pensioner has spent the last seven years trying to turn the tide on rubbish left by beachgoers on the Portobello shoreline.
Colin Cornwall, 70, who was born and raised in the Edinburgh suburb, spends hours on the promenade during the height of summer to tidy up cans, napkins, and food containers left by visitors.
“There’s a lot of litter that left after a busy hot sunny day so I come down late and clean it up a bit and then the following morning I’ll come down, but not that early,” the leader of volunteer group Keep Porty Tidy said.
Colin accepted that he faces a losing battle which will “never go away”, adding “people will always litter, people will always graffiti”.
He said: “Some days I’m out like five hours, six hours and if there’s a lot of litter, I could easily fill two bags.
“There’s a group of people, which we do regularly, and they’re all going out like 12 people then that’s eight bags of litter that isn’t now on the beach or the prom.”
The group’s Facebook page has over 1,300 followers and there is “rarely a week that goes by” without people offering their time to help clear-up the beach front.
Colin has become a recognisable face on the beachfront but said he does not do it for the recognition or notoriety, with much of the funding coming from his own pocket and a crowdfunding page launched last year.
“The GoFundMe has raised about £6,500 and over the seven years that I’ve been doing this I’ve easily spent two, three times that, easily,” he said.
Instead, he does it for his own satisfaction of keeping the now sought after neighbourhood where he grew up tidy and spends most days removing graffiti from the area’s signs and utility boxes, which he calls his “main bugbear”.
“Most of it is just, in my opinion, graffiti and vandalism, nobody’s interested in the tag, there’s no talent in it,” he said.
The retiree uses an acidic spray that he purchases through the council to remove the graffiti and has even commissioned two massive murals on the prom and by Towerbank Primary School to help put a stop to the vandalism.
Created by local artists, the murals were funded by the owner of Edinburgh-based pizza shop Civerinos, whose beachfront store offers free pizza to those volunteering to pick up litter.
“There’s really a vested interest from a lot of local people in the welfare of Portobello, people that live here really do care about the place,” Colin said.
He added: “We’re a lot busier because people now know Portobello has a beach, when I was a teenager, this place was dead, absolutely dead actually.
“Now it’s the opposite, the sun comes out and everybody comes to Portobello.”
The 70-year-old, who admitted that he is “always doing something”, said he had no plans to stop in his mission to keep Portobello tidy.