A Kew trader has been left fuming by a plague of graffiti vandals who targeted his shop.

Daniel Slack, who has been running the Kew Gardener by Kew Gardens station for 16 years, has urged police to do more to stop the scourge of youths with a spray can who regularly ruin the shops' frontages.

And he says the eyesore etchings do not just affect trade, but also the hoards of tourists arriving off the train on their way to World Heritage Site Kew Gardens.

The latest incident, in April, is still being investigated by police, who are looking at CCTV footage from the station.

Mr Slack said: "I felt really annoyed about it when I turned up in the morning and the front of my shop and my van had been sprayed.

"They target me, they get the hairdresser's and almost every other shop round here. They have virtually re-painted the subway. I always get promised it won't happen again and it will be dealt with but it isn't.These graffiti artists are targeting every shop in Kew."

Mr Slack said it would probably cost anywhere up to £1,000 to deal with the graffiti and added: "There's only a certain amount of times you can clean graffiti off before it starts leaving a dirty mark.

"We need some kind of deterrent to put them off and at the moment we don't have that.

"The police do not take it seriously enough."

He said he was worried tourists might be put off, coming to the area, adding: "We have millions of tourists coming to Kew every year and this is the first bit they see. This is right by a world heritage site but no one seems to be concerned about it."

Mr Slack added he had seen similar tags in Richmond and said it could be a gang who target the whole of the borough .