A group of anti-metric activists was celebrating today after a police investigation against them for tampering with road signs was dropped.

Tony Bennett and his supporters, Active Resistance to Metrification, have been painting over road signs with distances marked in metres and kilometres instead of yards and miles.

Sussex Police became involved after activists started to paint over signs in Crawley.

Non-practising solicitor Mr Bennett, 54, said: "The Crawley event is the sixth time I have been arrested.

"Five of those investigations have been dropped but in Kent I actually removed some signs so they said I had committed theft and criminal damage, although it is under appeal.

"For the last 13 months, because distance signs in metric are illegal and because some councils are not putting up signs in yards and miles, we have embarked on a direct action campaign.

"I went into Crawley after writing to the council five weeks earlier saying unless they put them back I intended to paint over all the signs in the centre, some 60 of them.

"Having painted over four of them I was taken to the cells, strip searched and all the rest of it. But I was not charged because what we were doing is completely legal."

Now Mr Bennett, from Harlow, Essex, has been given the all-clear he intends to go back this Friday and finish the job, handing out free wine to passers-by to celebrate.

Mr Bennett said one of the main reasons the group is opposing metrification is because the cost of changing signs over to satisfy Europe could be up to £1 billion.

He said: "It is bizarre in the extreme, when we have got people who need health care and homeless people who need help.

"We have decided the time for writing is over and if people won't listen we will take action."

It is not the first time Mr Bennett has made forays into Sussex to banish metric road signs.

Hastings residents received a shock in March when more than 160 signs had their details changed and in October 2000 it was Mr Bennett who forced Brighton and Hove City Council to change a sign from 400m to 450yds when he spotted it while attending a conference in the city.

Mr Bennett said: "I worked for the UK Independence Party and I could not see the logic in the legislation banning the selling of goods in pounds and ounces.

"You only make something a crime if the majority of people in the community agree it is a crime.

"I became very interested in who was pushing these rules through and I realised we have got a perfectly good system of weights and measures and the whole thing is being pushed down our throats."

A spokeswoman for Crawley Borough Council confirmed it would not be pressing charges after it was discovered the signs were illegal.

She said: "What he has done to the signs is actually not unattractive. He has blacked them out quite neatly."