the car park behind the Co-op on Brook Street in Tavistock is proving to be a magnet for anti-social behaviour.

Staff at the store reporting a fresh outbreak the weekend before last in which a shopping trolley was thrown from the balcony of an upstairs storey on to part of the roof and graffiti was sprayed on a fire escape.

Store manager Dawn Harrison said the back stairwell in the car park behind the store was also sprayed with graffiti on Saturday night, December 4 after a group apparently congregated to escape the worst of the weather. A trolley was thrown from the balcony of roof, smashing a hole in the tiles, she added.

Dawn said: ’This isn’t the first lot of damage we have had. These are the second set of fire doors that have been destroyed.’

She explained that while West Devon Borough Council is responsible for the multi-storey car park itself ’we are responsible for the stairwells and the lift’.

’There isn’t any CCTV and there is no-one watching what they are up to and as soon as it is wet they hang up out up there,’ she said. ’We have logged it with the police before but nothing happens.’

She added: ’We have waves of it. We had one group, now it is another one. I suppose they grow up and move on.’

She added that the trolley lobbed onto the roof had left a hole in the tiles and the fire doors would have to be replaced again.

’This is the second time we have had to replace them,’ she said. ’Because we have got no CCTV we have got no way of knowing who is doing this.’

She said the police had told her to log all the incidents of damage that occur and that she was doing this.

Her comments come after the shop was also targeted by several teenage boys wearing Tavistock College hoodies, apparently truanting from the secondary school on Monday last week.

The manager asked them to leave, and she says they took piles of leaflets with them. The school said later it was trying to locate them.