PEOPLE in a Kent village were forced to leave their homes when a man dug up an unexploded Second World War mortar bomb.

Lee Burgess thought he had dug up a rusty old car exhaust as he laid the foundations for a garden shed.

But when he casually tossed the metal lump aside, the mud fell away to reveal the bomb.

He called the emergency services and within minutes, six neighbours’ homes in King’s Road, Aylesham, near Canterbury, had been evacuated while the bomb disposal team were alerted.

Mr Burgess, 34, a railworker from nearby Queen’s Road, was helping his sister’s fiance, Chris Claxton, lay a concrete base in his back garden when the drama unfolded on Sunday.

He said: “I was digging away when the spade hit something metal. When I dug it out and threw it aside it actually hit the Wendy house and then I saw it was a bomb. I would never have touched it if I had known what it was.”

As a precaution, firefighters from Aylesham evacuated homes either side of the property while an Army bomb disposal team was called to the scene.

The experts from the Royal Logistics Corps examined the device and decided it could be dealt with by way of a controlled explosion using sand bags.

Mr Burgess said: “It went off with quite a bang and could have caused quite a lot of damage.”

Residents were allowed back into their homes three hours after they were evacuated.