My wife had the good sense to live close to Hampstead Heath, so she found an apartment opposite Golders Hill Park on its north western flank. Upon our engagement I moved in with her, and we lived some happy years alongside lovely neighbours, many of whom were recent empty-nesters. Back in 2018 the building was new, safe and modern, with a concierge, a gym on the lower ground floor, a bike room and large communal garden. Things changed one morning in early August 2024.
At the time I was working from home. On a Monday morning I arrived back from a run and opened the lift to discover a young man wearing a dirty grey tracksuit. He was clearly annoyed at being inconvenienced on his way up from the basement, and eyed me with a menacing scowl whilst muttering under his breath. I walked in to press our floor but discovered the number already lit up. He smelt of cannabis; when we arrived at our floor, he charged out and I dropped back pretending to look at my phone. To my alarm he took a set of keys from his joggers and hurriedly opened the door to the apartment next to ours.
I sent the concierge a WhatsApp asking whether he was available to talk. “I know what you want to talk about,” the response came. After showering I walked downstairs and met him in the fire escape. He was rattled and uncomfortable: “terrible situation,” he said shaking his head, “owner’s flat has been stolen”.
Over the next hour he revealed what had happened. The owner of the apartment next to ours, a man my wife and I knew, was using an established letting agency in North London find tenants for him. The agency had received an application in December 2023 and processed it through their standard diligence review, following which the rental was approved and keys handed over to the new tenant.
I thought back to that time and remembered a shy but nice enough man, early 30s, coming in and out of the apartment. Occasionally I’d bumped into him at gym and we’d greeted each other. In the only conversation we’d had he told me he had just returned from seeing family in Somaliland. Then in May he vanished. “He didn’t pay rent once since he moved in,” the concierge lamented, “one day he was gone”. I suspected that the youth I’d shared the lift with was the man’s “replacement”.
Having lived in Johannesburg for a decade wherein I’d experienced a number of violent incidents, including once being stabbed and another being shot at, I’d like to think I have a pronounced sense of trouble — and the youth in the lift screamed it. The concierge was scared, as were the cleaning staff (one of whom the youth had reportedly spat at). Back in my apartment I called the owner, who echoed the concierge’s explanation then detailed features of the law which overtly sided with delinquent tenants. He told me he had retained a lawyer who would be interfacing with the county courts and would include me in a correspondence chain. But over the next 48 hours things escalated.
In February, the couple with the infant and the other young couple both moved out, and the concierge moved back to Bogota
The following morning the concierge explained that cameras had recorded the youth and five of associates, all roughly the same age, loitering near a communal area at 3am. Consistent with the footage, he had received complaints of swearing and the smell of cannabis from other residents awoken by the gathering. Later that same day it got worse: an elderly resident couple were in the reception when the youth came in with a dog off its lead. The dog charged the woman, leaped on her and was just about to attack her husband when a plumber who miraculously happened to be walking through at the bravely stepped in front of him wielding a wrench. The youth grabbed the out-of-control dog by the collar and dragged it off whilst swearing at the assembled. Having heard about the incident I asked the husband to send me the photo he’d taken of the dog, which I then compared to a database of proscribed breeds in the UK. Almost certainly it was a Bully XL and therefore grounds for police to — at the very least — open a line of inquiry.
I volunteered to contact the Met and the area’s neighbourhood watch unit. Our floor consisted of five apartments: there was an elderly lady suffering dementia who lived with a carer, a family with a young baby, another young couple and a single woman living alone. I established a group chat and sent a message describing the situation with a caution for vigilance. I warned them it appeared associates of the youth were living with him in the apartment (a one bed) along with a clearly dangerous and possibly illegal dog.
“Yeah,” the officer said when I called, “not much we can do.” I emphasised that just the dog alone presented a threat to public safety, but he groaned: “hands are tied mate. Unless there’s an incident, not much we can do.” I ended the call before my impatience exposed itself and looked up the details of the neighbourhood watch unit. There were some names of constables and sergeants but when I pressed the “contact” link it led me to a broken page. Finding this unacceptable, I called the officer again: this time, sensing I wasn’t going to let go, he agreed to try and send a car that evening to look into the dog. I then wrote to Ms. Sackman expressing my concerns for the elderly resident on our floor and requested her swift intervention.
The police didn’t come. A month later I bumped into two bobbies on patrol outside the complex who confirmed it was their beat then asked whether they had heard about the apartment takeover. “Happens too often these days,” one shrugged, “very difficult to do anything about it.” In the weeks up until that point the temperature had accelerated. There were more incidents involving the dog. More complaints about the smell of marijuana polluting the floors above and below the apartment. Lumps of spit had been discovered on the floor of the lift. A resident on the floor below us noticed his balcony being filled with litter and cigarette butts and surmised that it was coming from the apartment above his; without knowing the full details of what was happening, he knocked on the apartment’s door with the objective of scolding the occupant, only to be confronted by the youth and three of his associates who put their fingers in his face and warned him to watch out. The panicked resident called me and told me he had noticed electronic tags on two of the youths’ ankles.
In December 2024 my wife and I were leaving to spend Christmas in California. Our packing was interrupted by the sound of banging on the door of the apartment next door. I looked through the door eye to discover three police officers — two men and a woman — standing outside.
“Abdul we know you’re in, it’s the police, come to the door.”
After some shuffling the door opened.
“The f*** you lot want?”
In any of the places I’d lived in — Johannesburg, Cape Town or Los Angeles — the police would have taken considerable exception to being spoken to like that. Not here.
“Abdul you’re not in any trouble mate. We just want to have a look at your dog. Can we see it please?”
“Nah, don’t have dog.”
In the event the officers had insisted on looking inside, they would have discovered quickly that Abdul was lying. Furthermore, the dog was being toileted on the balcony — coils of dog waste had piled up in the months that had passed.
“Abdul we need to make sure you’re following the law. Your neighbours say you have a dog, there’s a strong smell of marijuana and there have been complaints of anti-social behaviour.”
“F****** d***head! Not doin’ anything”.
One of the police officers sighed. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“We know that you aren’t paying rent and a dispute has been registered. We also know you’ve illegally changed the locks”.
“Waste man! Not me.”
Before the officers could counter, Abdul slammed the door in their faces. They walked away. Cynically, I returned to the reaction to the riots prompted by the Southport massacre in July. There, hundreds of people had been pro-actively collared under mere suspicion of provoking violence. It seemed unlikely that the arresting officers there would have started conversations with alleged perpetrators with: “you’re not in any trouble mate”.
A few weeks earlier there had been heightened activity in the apartment at all hours of the night for days on end — people coming and going with what sounded like boxes being moved around and shoved up against the walls. I sent some former military colleagues — now working for an intelligence consultancy in Canary Wharf — a folder of information on the happenings with a request for risk opinion. The opinion came in mid January 2025 — coinciding with a period of even more complaints from residents and even less of a response from authorities. It wasn’t good. My contacts had concluded that the events were consistent with a central depo-like fixture used by a drug gang to marshal or store its product, so included in the scope of risk was the possibility of a rival gang attempting to seize contents inside the apartment. Basically, the prospect of an armed robbery on our doorstep. Increasingly exasperated, I even attempted to contact the BBC in the hope that the producers of the series The Met would give me details of officials they’d encountered filming.
In mid February, the couple with the infant and the other young couple both moved out, and another of the concierge team quit to move back to Bogota, Colombia. “Much safer working there,” he said in a message to me.
On 25 February 2025, the government published the Crime and Policing Bill: Child criminal exploitation and “cuckooing” policy, which — in theory — should aid in evicting Adbul and his associates. However, it rests upon the idea that someone considered vulnerable is already occupying the residence when it is ensnared by the criminal elements. So it may not even be applicable to our situation — despite solid grounds to suspect illegal activity. After months of no response, the owner’s lawyer finally heard back from the county court. A date set for the middle of the year.
It is tempting to view our situation as a live demo to the consequences of the government’s loathing of landlords and the efforts complex management agencies take to insulate themselves from accountability or assistance, but it speaks equally to a society buckling under the weight of alternative, often academic-led qualification for crime, and the increasingly assertive demand that both the authorities and the public entertain open minds, however illogical or inappropriate. Abdul and his associates would be thrilled to learn that they have a powerful advocate in no less than the House of Lords, where Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb has linked up with protests amplifying tenant’s rights. These “rights” have been exploited to incorporate people like him — he’s gaming the system at the same time jeering the reluctance of police to do their jobs for fear of incurring the wrath of those imposing unfamiliar perspectives upon us. Our neighbours continue to vacillate between fear, confusion and disappointment.
