CITY busker Frank Williams has been given four weeks to quit his tent home next to the River Itchen after losing a four-year legal battle.

Winchester City Council was granted a repossession order on Wednesday to evict 54-year-old Mr Williams from St Catherine's Hill in Garnier Road. He has lived there for more than 10 years.

Mr Williams, pictured, whose 'dome' even has its own postcode, has also been ordered to pay £1,750 costs.

He had argued that the council had failed to conclusively show that they owned the land.

He had also maintained that he had a right to the land under the adverse possession law, commonly known as squatters' rights, where a person who has lived on a site for 12 years gains possession of the land.

But Judge Nicholas Murphy told Winchester County Court this week that Mr Williams' case had failed on both fronts.

The judge said in his view the council had provided sufficient evidence to prove that the land was theirs, and he further rejected Mr Williams' suggestion that the piecemeal way the evidence was submitted suggested there was something "suspicious" about the documents.

Furthermore, he said the adverse possession claim had also failed because Mr Williams had written a letter to the Winchester mayor in 2002 when the council's first eviction attempt was conducted, in which he only claimed to have been at the site since 1994.

After the hearing Mr Williams said: "I'm very disappointed and I'm still not convinced I've got to the bottom of this.

"It looks as though I'm going to have to move, though there might be the possibility of an appeal and there's still further action I'm thinking of taking, so maybe this isn't the last of it yet.

"As for the costs, well it's a bit ridiculous. I have no money and no savings, and the only reason their costs got so high is that they failed to get the right evidence before the court, time and time again.

"As yet I really don't know what I'm going to do about that, or my home if I eventually have to leave it, but something will come up."