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“It never felt like home, not once. I regret the day I came to this place. It’s been really, really difficult,” Marta Ramos sighed. That’s how she and several other Londoners have been left feeling after years of living in Britannia Point in Colliers Wood, South West London.
The apartment block has been riddled with problems since day one, resident say, with one going as far as saying that it’s a relief to have been evicted. Since moving into the tower in 2018, Marta has voiced a number of concerns, from broken lifts and reoccurring leaks to smashed windows and parcels being stolen. This is not what she expected after paying £1,450 every month, on top of bills.
Marta, 36, told MyLondon: “It has been situation after situation in the last four years since we moved in. To start of with, both lifts were not working on the day we moved in. There was no communication at the time and we had to walk up 16 flights of stairs with everything we owned.”
READ MORE: ‘Our bin store has been taken over by drug-taking homeless people who leave poo on the floor’
(Image: Kieran Kelly/MyLondon)
Concerns intensified one month ago when one of the building’s glass panes cracked and shards of glass rained onto the surrounding pavement. At the time, with footage circulating on social media, the incident appeared to be random. Some residents said they heard that a bird had flown into it and caused it to crack.
According to Marta, the incident was not random and came as no surprise. She said: “I didn’t see the window smash but there was a big, big crash…I heard it from the other side of the building. I can tell you now – it was not a bird. The building has a lot of problems and structural issues. Now, after a lot of use and weather issues, it is cracking up.”
This was just the tip of the iceberg, Marta says. Not a single lift worked for over two months during the pandemic, she claims, who’s flat has also been damaged by a number of leaks. The worst leak came in 2018 when the apartment block was managed by Acorn Group.
Marta said: “In December 2018, we had a leak in our flat it took them (Acorn Group) three months to take care of it. They only decided to fix it when we said we wouldn’t pay our rent.” Since then, Criterion Capital has taken over the management of Britannia Point. This made matters worse, Marta says, as all resident complaints were “completely ignored” by the new management.
‘Eviction notice was a relief’
Another resident who has been entirely dissatisfied with his time living in Britannia Point is Lucas Lemos. He decided to move in with his girlfriend just over one year ago because rent was low and compared to other flats they had seen, the quality appeared to be of a high standard.
Unlike Marta, Lucas and his girlfriend had a positive start. They were living in a lovely area in a stylish apartment, something which they had never experienced in London before. Things worsened quickly. The lifts started to break, almost on a monthly basis. Whenever they tried to speak to anyone, they were met with “endless bureaucracy”.
Following the recent window incident, Lucas decided that enough was enough. Shortly afterwards, he received an email that his rent was going to be increased. This is despite the fact that a number of other glass panes appeared to have cracks he said. As of July 28, the entire building was surrounded with scaffolding, meaning access to the apartment block is limited, as work continues to make sure all panes are safe and secure.
He could not make sense of his rent being increased given the “ongoing problems”. Lucas, 23, told MyLondon: “I just got evicted last week. In the middle of this they emailed me saying that my rent was going up. I said ‘it cannot go up, there’s no sense of it going up…there’s literally smashed windows.’ I called them to complain about the rent and they got me evicted.”
Being evicted from a rental property will be some people’s worse fears. For Lucas, it’s been a relief. He is actually planning to move out of his apartment before the end of his eviction notice “because it’s just not good for me to live in this building anymore”.
He continued: “No one wants to unite against the management because they are afraid they are going to get evicted. And look what happens, I’ve been evicted.”
‘Enough is enough’
Lucas and Marta have had enough. While Lucas plans to leave before the end of his eviction notice, Marta is planning a move to Greenwich with her husband. For her, the final straw was a “spate of parcel thefts” that swept the building several months ago.
“”There was, for a period, a time where our parcels were disappearing. So Royal Mail or DPD would deliver a parcel, it would get left outside the flat door and it would go missing. It happened to me – DPD said they had delivered something, took a photo but when I got home, it was gone. This was worth over £100.
“This was reported in May – I have not heard a single thing since. How do they have the nerve to increase rent?”
MyLondon contacted Criterion Capital and Acorn Group for comment but they did not reply in time for publication.
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