EXCLUSIVE: Residents in one of Croydon’s tallest buildings are becoming increasingly angry and militant over their treatment by their multi-billion-pound landlords. By STEVEN DOWNES
Time to quit: residents in The 35-storey The Fold, close to Croydon Town Hall, have laid out their compensation conditions to owners L&G
The owners of The Fold, the 35-storey residential tower in Queen’s Gardens, have been given a deadline of Tuesday to respond to tenants’ demands, which include full repayment of all rents and guaranteed safe rehousing.
Residents’ lives have been blighted by damp, mould and leaks almost since the building opened just three years ago
Inside Croydon reported last week how the block’s managers, Urbanbubble, had ordered all their remaining tenants in the 251-flat tower to vacate their homes in six months, to allow for a complete refit of the building.
While paying rents close to £3,000 per month on some flats, tenants have suffered leaks, there have been collapsed ceilings, unhealthy mould on the walls and, in some cases, human effluent rising up into the baths of the supposedly “luxury apartments”.
Residents have also had to endure repeated outages of their water supply, as well as lack of heating, and regular lift breakdowns which have placed some tenants in serious danger.
This week, the London Fire Brigade conducted an urgent safety inspection at the request of residents concerned at poorly fitted fire doors and fire shutters that do not work.
Today, The Fold is estimated to be no more than half occupied, as some tenants had already decided to seek accommodation in properties less damaging to their health.
Afterthought: Urbanbubble only took down their marketing materials this week, after they had written to existing tenants telling them to leave
Yet even after Urbanbubble wrote to remaining tenants last week asking them to leave by March 2026, they were continuing to offer flats on their website as available for rent.
It has only been in the last few days that they have removed those properties from their website and the market.
Legal and General, the giant insurance corporation, bought The Fold from developers Hub for £100million in 2018. Last year, L&G said it was “deeply concerned” by reports of mould, damp and leaks in the flats. Tenants have records of complaints about the conditions dating back to September 2022 – within weeks of moving in – which they say the property managers ignored.
In the past year, tenants have had a new form of encroachment to contend with, as surveyors and maintenance staff have attempted entry to properties without notice. And after 12 months of attempting patchwork remediation works, the building’s owners have realised they needed to give The Fold a complete overhaul.
On Tuesday, around 70 residents of The Fold turned out at a meeting organised by ACORN, the community union. A series of residents told of their experiences of their mouldy new homes, of how they had suffered rashes, coughing and breathing problems.
Ceiling collapsing: despite paying sky-high rents, falling ceilings have been a problem for tenants in The Fold
It was not until May 2024 – almost two years after The Fold greeted its first tenants – that building engineers discovered a soil pipe behind the walls which was cracked, believed to be the source of leaks and mould. Yet even after that was was repaired, leaks of sewage continued. The building’s reception area had scaffolding erected on a near-permanent basis, with tarpaulin erected to capture water seeping from its ceiling.
“Let us be free from this hellhole,” one resident pleaded.
Another told how they had checked themselves into a hospital A&E to keep themself safe. “It was not healthy to be in that dark space living 25 floors up,” they said.
And another tenant related how they had to deal with their neighbours’ waste water coming up in their bath. “We had a bath full of poo, basically.”
When building managers repeated the claim that the building is safe, it drew loud groans of disbelief from the audience. “If it was safe to live in, they wouldn’t be ordering around a hundred households to get out in the next six months,” said one attendee, deeply unconvinced.
An ACORN union rep told Inside Croydon, “Rightly, our members are furious and outraged.
Nightmare conditions: mould continues to grow on the walls of these supposedly ‘luxury apartments’
“All the while our members were facing these issues, they were subject to regular rent increases on top of paying service charges, intended to be used for the maintenance of the building.
“Legal and General is the largest asset management business in the UK, ranking in the top 20 largest global asset management companies with more than £1trillion in assets under management.
“This situation can only be explained by sheer corporate greed, neglect and the exploitation of our members.”
ACORN calls the offer of four months’ rent as compensation “meagre”. They say that before the letter was sent on September 11, the building managers were using Section 21 notices – “no-fault evictions” – to get some residents to vacate.
The Fold residents have now submitted five demands to L&G:
- Compensation including full rent refunds
- Rent waived for the duration of tenancy
- Guaranteed safe rehousing
- Moving costs covered
- Transparent communication
An ACORN spokesperson said: “We await a response from Legal and General by Tuesday September 23 and have set a deadline for our demands to be met by October 31.
“Our members are prepared to take further action if they do not get the justice they deserve,” they said.
“We are ready to stand up and fight back.”
Effluent issues: at Tuesday’s emergency meeting, Fold residents told of the appalling conditions they have been forced to endure
Rowenna Davis, the Labour Party’s candidate for Croydon Mayor, this week said that she “fully supports residents’ demands for increased compensation and help with moving out of this nightmare”.
Davis tweeted, “We must stand up for our community. Residents at The Fold deserve to be treated fairly.”
Croydon’s failed Mayor, Jason Perry, has said nothing on the topic of the state of The Fold, nor about conditions in the neighbouring block of council flats, Malcolm Wicks House.
L&G have hired a swanky public relations firm to comment on the emergency at The Fold, and they told Inside Croydon: “We have been conducting thorough investigations to understand the root causes of the issue and remediate accordingly.
“We resolved some of the defects to the roof and internal pipework, while also implementing measures to stop active leaks from identified sources. Damp and mould-affected materials, including damaged plasterboard, have also been professionally treated or removed from the building.
“Under the Building Safety Act, remediation is categorised between ‘emergency repairs’ and ‘reinstatement’. Emergency repairs, which we have carried out across the roof, internal pipework and damaged plasterboard, do not require approval from the Building Safety Regulator.
“Reinstatement works require enhanced building control (Gateway 2) approval. The remaining remediation works, which includes repairing the compartmentation issues, are subject to regulatory approval, the application for which is underway.
Long gone: how Taberner House used to overlook a well-tended and well-used Queen’s Gardens
“Unfortunately, this work cannot be completed whilst the building is occupied, which is why we therefore require residents to vacate by March 1, 2026.”
The Fold is one of four blocks, built on the site of Taberner House, the former Croydon Council office building, and providing more than 500 homes.
Originally, the site was earmarked for their CCURV joint venture with John Laing which delivered the hugely costly Fisher’s Folly council offices on the other side of Fell Road. This was at a time when Jason Perry (the one and same) was the Conservative-run council’s cabinet member for development
Then it was considered by a new Labour council for a Brick by Brick scheme. Eventually, the site – including a large chunk of Queen’s Gardens, the town centre’s only green space – was sold to developers Hub in order to achieve capital receipts for the council.
Croydon Council granted planning permission for the overall scheme in January 2018, including the building that was to be called The Fold, with a single staircase to its 35th floor.
This design was approved by Croydon Council planners six months after the Grenfell Tower disaster in which 72 people died, where the lack of a second staircase in a tall residential tower was seen as a contributory factor in the tragedy’s appalling death toll.
Read more: The Fold folds: Hundreds of tenants given six months to leave
Read more: L&G ‘deeply concerned’ by state of high-rise flats at The Fold
Read more: Croydon shamed over ‘dangerous squalor’ in council flats
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