A powercut has this evening hit more than a thousand Hampshire homes.

The lights went out across a number of communities in the New Forest at around 6.15pm today.

At first around 1,700 homes across Lymington, New Milton, Tiptoe, Bashley, Hinton and Christchurch were affected.

But by 7.30pm that number was down to 1,000.

Southern Electric say they do not currently know what the problem and there is no time scale for re-connection - but engineers are working to fix the fault as soon as possible.