Milk-mad Mike Harmer has got a lotta bottles - more than 1,000 in fact. The collection takes up most of his house.

Mike, 56, started collecting milk bottles in the Eighties when adverts started to appear on their sides.

He has since become something of an expert on the white stuff and his home in Robson Road, Worthing, is packed with hundreds of bottles of different shapes, sizes and colours.

He has pints, half pints, third-pints, quarts, bottles made out of green glass and others dating back to before the First World War.

Mike said: "One day my wife and I were washing up milk bottles and noticed these really nice adverts on them, so we just decided to keep them on display. It grew from there.

"I started collecting for the love of the objects and, obviously, the more attractive the advert was, the better.

"Now, as a local historian, I collect ones which have some local significance."

Mike has delved into the history of the bottles and can reel off a string of facts about their evolution from their introduction during the Victorian era to their 21st Century counterparts.

His oldest bottle dates back to 1890 and hails from a dairy farm in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire.

But his most highly-prized possession is a bottle from Findon Farm in Worthing, which won Best Bottle at the extraordinary-sounding milk bottle collectors' convention in Crawley.

Mike, who works in Lancing as an accountant, also won the best overall display prize at the meeting, which was attended by about 40 other fans of dairy produce.

At one stage, Mike had more than 3,000 in his house but eventually reduced his collection to include only those he wanted to keep on display.

He says his collection is small compared to other collectors he knows.

He said: "There are some people in this country who have thousands of bottles but the hobby is much bigger in the United States than over here."

Painted advertisements were removed from milk bottles in the early Nineties when infrared scanners were brought in to check bottles had been properly cleaned.

The adverts showed up as dirt on the new scanners and were phased out.

Some small dairies continue to use colourful bottles but with fewer people having milk delivered to their doorstep, it may only be a matter of time before glass milk bottles are confined to the history books.