It is like walking through a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The street is near empty of human presence as everyone locks themselves away from the chaos that rages on outdoors.
The only sound that can be heard is the loud clinking of used beer cans rattling across the street as the wind gains momentum.
Plastic bags are flying into car windscreens as the few vehicles that decide to brave the outside world are forced to dodge overflowing wheelie bins that have been left stranded in the middle of the road.
No, this isn’t a scene from Netflix show, The Last of Us.
It is Alton Road in Selly Oak, Birmingham.
The street is one of the worst-hit by the city’s bin strikes which has seen waste piling up for six weeks now as workers walk out over ‘hugely damaging’ cuts to wages.
Dubbed with the unfortunate name of ‘Smelly Oak’ long before the bins crisis hit, the area is lined with tightly packed terraced housing.
It is one of the more deprived spots in Birmingham city centre and is densely populated with student housing and HMOs holding several families in one property.
Alton Road, in Selly Oak, was covered in trash when MailOnline visited on Wednesday
Just two roads down, on Selly Park Road, a more affluent street in the area, there was not a rubbish bag in sight
Ben Nicholls, 22, a student at Birmingham University, told of how awful the rubbish has been
Taunton Road, in Balsall Heath, has also been particularly hard-hit by the bin strikes
Most properties on the street pack in about seven or eight rooms, with the average house price sitting around £360,000.
And when MailOnline visited on Wednesday morning, there was trash scattered everywhere.
Meanwhile, a two-minute walk up the road tells an entirely different story.
As soon as you cross over from Alton Road in Selly Oak to the likes of Oakfield Road in Selly Park – just 0.2miles away – you enter the ‘smarter’ bit, as one resident put it.
The houses average at £1.1million and are generally large detached and semi-detached properties with private garages, several floors, and expansive back gardens.
Here, the streets are clear of any debris.
The only specks you will find on the ground are the beautiful pink petals falling from the cherry blossom trees.
Speaking to MailOnline, a resident on the leafy street of Selly Park Road, which runs down from Oakfield Road, admitted the divide seems ‘unfair’.
Louise Romans, 48, said: ‘For us it’s not been too bad. Our bins were collected last week, and it was probably about three weeks since the last one.
‘People around here have been taking it to the tip themselves.
‘The problem is in student accommodation because obviously they can’t get to the tip because they don’t have cars.
‘So what can they do? That’s why it stinks. My daughters walks through there sometimes when she comes from the station, and she said it’s horrible and overflowing.
‘So there seems to be a real difference and its just a couple of roads away.
A rat running towards rubbish bags in Poplar Road, Sparkhill – another less affluent part of the city
Agency workers were spotted clearing some bins away in Selly Oak on Wednesday. However, there were still uncleared bins laying strewn across the roads
Pictured: Harrison Road, in Selly Oak, which has seen fly-tipping as well as piles of rubbish
Oakfield Road, where average house prices range above £1million, was spotless
Just minutes away from the badly-affected areas were streets where you could not tell there were strikes
A heap of bin bags piled on top of each other on North Road in Selly Oak
‘I think when they came to collect our waste last week, they obviously just didn’t do those roads. Which isn’t fair.
‘You would think they have more need because there’s more people in a smaller space.
‘I was keeping some of the rubbish away in my garage some of the time, which again they can’t do.
‘It’s a mixture of where you’ve got more space you’ve got more space to hide the rubbish away and keep it off the roads. And when you’ve got more money you’ve got a car and can take it for yourself.
‘In Harborne [another affluent part of Birmingham] I know people have been paying private contractors to collect the waste as well.’
The entire city has been dubbed ‘rat city’ after the strikes which began on March 11 saw streets piled up high in rubbish and taken over by rodents.
More than 350 workers have walked out over a running dispute over the removal of the role of waste recycling and collection officer (WRCO).
Despite the council putting an offer on the table on Monday in a bid to bring the disruption to a close, it fell through after union members ‘overwhelmingly rejected’ it.
And in many cases, the more deprived areas of Selly Oak, Balsall Heath and Hall Green are bearing the brunt of the crisis, while affluent areas such as Selly Park, Edgbaston, Moseley and Harborne remain largely spotless.
Speaking to MailOnline, Ben Nicolls, a student who lives on Alton Road said: ‘Driving through areas like Bournville and Edgbaston and Harborne you won’t see these kind of issues.
‘I think there is an aspect of this a very student dominated area and the council feel they can leave it to do whatever because most of us are students and most of us aren’t permanent residents here and so they think this kind of rubbish doesn’t affect us.
‘But it does.
Freya Taylor, 21, told of how they have had people using their bins and dumping their waste outside of their house
A snippet of what the scene looked like at Alton Road. Plastic bags were flying in the wind
A massive pile of bin bags piled up on Oldfield Road in Balsall Heath
Rubbish being removed by a grabber truck in Balsall Heath
‘And there are permanent residents who live here with families and kids. There is a school just here, there’s a church just there, there’s a mosque a couple roads over.
‘People are living their lives around here and to have to work or live or exist in this environment is not healthy at all, it’s not nice.
‘I think even just going two roads down, you can see a massive shift.
‘You won’t see rubbish strewn across the road and I think you can say that maybe people are dealing with it more responsibly if they’ve got more time or they’ve got access to cars.
‘But I think there is definitely an aspect of the council favouring those areas because they are permanent constituents, they’re ‘adults’, and I think there is a little bit of a targeting towards students because we don’t pay council tax, and we cause a lot of issues in a lot of people’s eyes.
‘When there’s this many people living in such a small space there’s always going to be people who cause issues, but to punish the entire area I think is pretty unfair.’
Freya Taylor, 21, also told of her disgust at the state of the roads.
She studies at the University of Birmingham, which is just down the road from Selly Oak.
She said: ‘It’s been horrible, it’s actually disgusting.
‘This road won’t get sorted because it’s not in bin bags. The bins might get done but the actual rubbish all across the road won’t get sorted.
‘This road is particularly bad for it, I don’t really know why. It’s just disgusting.
‘The rat that was on BBC News was literally just there’, she said pointed to the corner of the road.
‘It was big, it was huge. And the smell is bad too. It’s just disgusting.
‘Last night I was driving back from work and I don’t know why but the bins were just all across the road.
‘There’s definitely a difference in how these areas are compared to other parts.
‘Obviously where there are students there are so many people living in a small space. So there is so much more rubbish anyway compared to a normal family.
A picture of Selly Park Road, in the affluent Selly Park area
Avinash Mehrawit said the rubbish has been bad for weeks
People complained that while other more affluent areas were rubbish-free, the more deprived streets had less space to store their waste away from the roads
A pile of the bin bags on Hallam Road in Balsall Heath, which neighbours Moseley – a ‘posher’ area down the road
‘They have cleared up a bit, it’s definitely better than it was. I’ve just gone home for Easter and come back for a few days and it was worse then.
‘There were literally piles of bin bags everywhere.’
Speaking of people dumping their rubbish in front of their house, she said: ‘Quite often we come home and there’s just curry outside our porch, or other food.
‘Or people have just dumped rubbish outside our house, it’s not even our rubbish, but its just outside the front of our house.
‘People have even been trying to use our bins, if you have space in your bins now its like a luxury.
‘There’s seven of us living in our student house. The boys are quite good at getting the rubbish out and stuff, but if there’s nowhere to put it there’s nowhere to put it.
Avinash Mehrawit, who also lives on the rubbish-ridden street said it shouldn’t be a difference between ‘rich or poor’, and that it is about the ‘standards’ they’re having to live in.
The 30-year-old said: ‘It’s the worst.
‘You can see it for yourself.
‘It’s been two months and they’ve not taken the garbage.
‘It’s not about rich or poor, it’s about the standards we’re living in.
‘It’s a mess everywhere.’
Hopes of ending the strike were trashed when union workers rejected an offer from the council
Chris Rance, 60, lives in the Selly Park area but was walking through the rubbish-ridden Alton Road
In Balsall Heath, commercial bins are also overflowing with waste
Chris Rance, who lives in the more affluent Upland Road in Selly Park, was walking through Alton Road when he said: ‘It’s a bit cleaner where I am, just a bit of a smarter area really.
‘This area is particularly bad. This is always bad actually, it isn’t just to do with the strike.
‘I’ve complained to the local council about the state of the rubbish on these streets. It’s bad all-year round and obviously this has made it worse and then it was windy last night so it’s all blowing all over the place.
‘It really is horrible. You can’t even walk on the pavement, it’s just swimming with rubbish.
‘I’m surprised there’s not more rats around.
‘The students have got to come back to this in a few weeks but hopefully the council will clear it by then. They’ve got a massive job on their hands.’
Speaking of the area where he lives, the 65-year-old said: ‘I live further up beyond this area here and it’s fairly clean.
‘It was never really too bad, we just didn’t get collections. Our recycling bins are full now and you can’t get a slot at the council recycling centres to drop it off.
‘I think it’s just space isn’t it? If you’ve got terraced houses or a flat or something there’s less space to store large quantities of waste.
‘The thing is the less affluent parts of Birmingham are always messier. They have been for years.’
Meanwhile, some residents in the affluent suburbs felt the divide had little to do with the different area, but all to do with the effort to manage the waste more effectively.
Tony and Caroline, who live on Oakfield Road, said: ‘One thing I do object to is that every time you see Birmingham it’s in the, shall we say, poorer parts?
‘Have you seen any bags here? There are none on our road.
‘Everybody has got a dustbin and a place to put their rubbish. Even if they’ve only got a small yard, okay we’ve got a bigger one.
‘In my view, people that park big heaps of stuff outside somebody’s house or whatever it is, they should be prosecuted for dumping.
‘Down there, at the best of times it looks a mess there.
Chase Hartley, a worker at a private rubbish collection company, said they have been overwhelmed with jobs
Farqhuar Road East, also in the Selly Park area, was rid of any bin bags
A photo of the recycling kept in the garage by Tony and Caroline who live in Selly Park
Another pile of garbage left outside a person’s house on George Road, Selly Oak, next to Birmingham University
Taunton Road in Balsall Heath, by Balsall Heath park, was also particularly badly affected
‘Most people find somewhere in the garden, safe, not piling it outside somebody’s house, or in the road.
‘And I’m not racist in any shape or form, but it’s mainly in the immigrant areas, which is a factor.’
Chase Hartley, a worker at a private waste management company, told MailOnline: ‘We’ve had loads of people reaching out to us since the strikes began.
‘It’s been really busy. It’s been mad.
‘I think every private company probably has their hands full right now.
‘We’ve never been this busy before. I’ve been doing this job on my own for about three years and this is the worst it’s been.
‘They’ve had hire someone else to help me as well.
‘People are putting their rubbish in our bins.
‘Where I live out near the airport it’s not too bad.
‘But it gets worse as you get into the centre.
‘Some places look okay. It depends on the people living in the area.’
