I’M what is generally referred to in these times of selfies and belfies as a ‘big old unit’. I’m 6ft4 and tip the scales at more than 15 stones. Walking through Bournemouth Square from the Triangle heading towards the Echo’s Richmond Hill HQ on Tuesday night at around 9.30pm, though, I felt apprehensive. A bit scared if I’m honest.

Those feelings of trepidation were perhaps magnified by the fact that, only a few hours earlier, I had laid out the front page of this newspaper revealing a shocking 220 serious, alcohol-related crimes in just 41 days in Bournemouth, including three rape allegations and machete and knife incidents.

Bournemouth occupies a very big part of my heart. I studied here, my children have grown up in Dorset, I have spent almost as much of my life watching Cherries as I have the team along the south coast I grew up supporting. I fell in love with the local newspaper, of which I am now the deputy editor, as soon as I arrived at Bournemouth University in 1998.

When meeting new people, I tell them I am from Bournemouth, not my birth town. The reaction is generally ‘You lucky [insert expletive]. I’d love to live by the sea’.

And they’re right, of course, we are all very lucky indeed. But we’re also blighted. Which takes me back to Tuesday night.

Walking, with far greater pace than I would in daylight hours, down Commercial Road past Marks & Spencer, there were two vagrants heading in my direction, both with wine bottles. I glanced to my right and there was another sat in the doorway of a shop, talking loudly to himself.

The Square was full of young teenagers on skateboards, none of whom have been able to nail a single trick in the whole time I’ve lived in Bournemouth, but that’s another matter.

They’re in the way. They’re intimidating, not so much to me, but to older generations who, God forbid, maybe want to enjoy a stroll in a seaside town after dinner on a Tuesday night.

Revellers were few and far between, as I continued apace up Richmond Hill, but on a Friday or Saturday, you can add a fair helping of drunken louts to the mix.

I didn’t get ‘bottled’, mugged or even mildly abused by either the skateboarders, drinkers or the homeless folk. But it’s not about that. It’s about how it made me, all 6ft4 and 15 stones of me, feel. Worse than that, it’s about how it all looks to those visiting the town. Worse still, I refer you to Wednesday’s front page and those 220 crimes and yesterday’s front page featuring a man being smashed across the face with a plank of wood.

The idealistic Bournemouth, certainly the Bournemouth the authorities would rather see portrayed in the media, is very much the sandy, sunny resort. We have the Air Festival, the award-winning beaches, the shows, a concert venue attracting some great acts.

But the truth is, granted like most towns to a degree, Bournemouth has an extremely undesirable underbelly and it’s one that is rising to the surface. The town’s homeless problem is bordering on an epidemic.

The quality of some of the drinking establishments, the prices of the poison, are like homing beacons for trouble. The town is it’s own worst enemy in that respect. Ditto the saturation of rehabilitation centres.

Yesterday we learned that crime in Dorset as a whole was up 14 per cent. Yet the Public Sector spin machine’s latest excuse was “a greater emphasis being placed on accuracy” when publishing increases in total crime. Over at the Town Hall, meanwhile, a communications officer was tweeting this newspaper to ensure we were aware that those 220 crimes were spread over 41 nights and did not take place in a single evening. Riggghhhht, that’s okay then.

Talk of a La Ramblas experience in Bournemouth, reported in this paper recently, is a wonderful idea but complete pie in the sky with so many drinking venues flooding the town and homeless filling the doorways. Having walked La Ramblas before, I’d add I felt a whole lot safer there than I did on Tuesday.

It’s heads out of the sand time for the borough council and Dorset Police.

It doesn’t matter how much money is ploughed into new developments, the digital business revolution and housing, if the town’s homeless and alcohol-related crime issues are not bitten with more venom by those who actually have the teeth, people will eventually stop coming, stop investing, stop caring.

And those already here, like you and I perhaps, will keep as far away as we can. Bournemouth has that place in my heart, but, at times, it goes some way to breaking it.