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Taxi firm moves its staff out of 'Beirut'
A taxi firm is preparing to uproot its operations from Somers Town – because staff are fed up of it acting 'like a police station'.
AquaCars aims to shift 65 jobs from Somers Road to a new headquarters at the Pompey Centre in Rodney Road by Christmas.
Staff refer to their current base as 'Beirut', and complain that employees have had to deal with incidents from drunken yobs to blood-drenched stabbing victims seeking refuge at its 24-hour office.
The nearest police station is roughly one-third-of-a- mile away along Winston Churchill Avenue but closes at 11pm, and the Southsea station was closed to the public as of summer 2008.
Cabbies say it makes the Aqua office one of the few venues with a round-the-clock presence in the area.
Director Ronnie Leng, 51, said: 'If anything happens around here they come in to get a cab to the hospital. It's getting worse I think, and it's just time to move on.
'We get them coming here every day. Junkies walking in here, do you want to buy this or that, all kinds of things. You spend a week here, you could write a book.
'You never see the police walk round here. We're here like a presence, we're witnesses.'
One long-time employee who regularly works nightshifts said she 'can't wait' for the move.
'There's a lot of trouble here, all the time to be honest,' said Karen Binding, 43. 'We get people coming in who've been stabbed, all sorts.
'There was one last year, where he got stabbed in a block of flats up the road. It was the nearest place, and he'd sort of stumbled along the road and come here.
'It was quite scary; he was only a young lad. I phoned the ambulance and police and just stayed with him and kept him talking.
'We've had incidents where people have been beaten up, mugged, there's a lot of drugs around, but the police are never here unless we call them, and sometimes not even then.'
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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