We live next to world’s most expensive home – but we shop at discount stores and struggle to pay spiralling gas bills
THE community fridge is completely empty, with all the food having been taken in the morning.
Many residents living in Poole, Dorset, are also resorting to use food banks as they struggle to cope with the spiralling cost of living.
Here, the poor rub shoulders with the rich.
And this month, the coastal town’s outcrop of Sandbanks became the most expensive place to live on the planet after a four-bedroom waterside bungalow sold for £13.5million – making the peninsular even more pricey than Monaco, New York and Hong Kong.
And one street has 13 waterfront mansions at a total cost of £93million.
Just a few minutes away, Rossmore, a suburb close to Millionaires' Row, is home to some of the most deprived people in Dorset.
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Brian Fuller, 79, has lived in the area for years after retiring from military service and sees 'two different types of people living in Poole'.
He said: "The whole area is split into two types of people with the lucky over in Sandbanks and the unlucky over here."
Brian added: “The cost of living has hit this part of Poole hard.
"Gas prices have really gone up, my gas bill used to be £44 a quarter and it has gone all the way up to £138.
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"Our electricity bills have also gone through the roof along with the food prices in the shops.
"I shop every week in Asda and you just see everything slowly creeping up in price and my pension payments aren't.”
On Melbury Avenue where we talked to the residents of Rossmore, we saw a sofa abandoned in a drive, along with dilapidated rusting cars. The buildings were grimy and dated.
The high street has several low budget shops, including Poundland and Poundstretcher and many charity shops but little else.
The community fridge at Rossmore Library was already bare when we arrived, its shelved being cleared by hard-up locals by first thing in the morning.
And Poole Food Bank+ saw an ";80 per cent" increase in visitors last year.
Millie Earl, a local Lib Dem councillor, emphasised how hard the last year has been for residents of the area.
She explained that she had seen a 40 per cent rise in the number of users of the community fridge in Rossmore Library compared to last year.
She said: "I live in Rossmore and I like where I live, there is a strong sense of community.
"We have seen a huge rise in the number of people coming in for food.
"There is a huge disparity between Rossmore and Sandbanks or Canford Cliffs.
"We are one of the most deprived areas in the country.
"People are very kind and supportive here but we need more than that.
"One step that needs to be taken is to allocate more funding from the seafront and Sandbanks to the most deprived areas.
"There seems to be an idea in the council that if they fund the seafront and boost tourism that there will be a trickle down to poorer areas but that just doesn't happen.
"The sort of jobs which tourism supplies are zero hour contracts and seasonal work.
"We need more money to make sure our public parks and gardens don't just rot away.
"The Government recently gave £18m for work on the seafront but we won't see any of that."
The Sandbanks peninsular - home to beautiful beaches, sparkling blue waters and stunning seafood restaurants - drives up average house prices in Poole.
Multi-million pound yachts can be seen regularly sailing in and out of the harbour.
The exclusive Sandbanks has been home to celebrities, including Harry Redknapp and son Jamie Redknapp.
Diana Triggs has lived in Rossmore for 50 years and she used to clean the properties on Sandbanks.
She said: "They are just lucky, aren't they? And we're unlucky.
"With the cost of living problem prices are going up, council tax is going up again and everything just gets harder for us.
"I used to do cleaning for different houses in Sandbanks and some of them were very nice people, they're just lucky.
"It's a case of some have and some haven't."
Another resident who wished to remain anonymous described the frustration of living so close to Sandbanks and the assumption that everybody in the area was wealthy.
She said: "When you say to people that you live in Poole the first thing they think of is Sandbanks and the millionaires there.
"All it actually means is that everything is hellishly expensive.
"A few years ago we had to use a food bank and it was really hard to do. It's humiliating.
"I'm at the point where I don't know what the answer to all these problems is.
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"If people are paid more then shops will keep raising their prices too.
"Who knows what we will do?"